Journalists are trained not to speculate about a subject's intent. How do we know what goes on in a chap's brain? That noted, Swiss Army Man feels like a project that was designed to polarise opinions. The directors surely yearned for every viewer to either hate or love the thing. It's so weird, you see.
The film stars Paul Dano as a marooned depressive who uses Daniel Radcliffe’s lifeless body as surfboard, headboard and sounding board. Nobody is likely to be indifferent about something so original. Right?
Well, pardon me for being a party-pooper. But Swiss Army Man looks exactly like the sort of film two jokily named pop video directors (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert are credited as "Daniels") might make in unacknowledged homage to Michel Gondry.
The surface weirdness does nothing to conceal the sentimentality and conventionality at the film’s sugared core. Mortality is always at our elbow, but nobody is likely to confuse the film with the work of Beckett. Daniels (sigh) believe in redemption.
The worst news for the directors is that I didn't even hate it. Swiss Army Man is all right. If The Magnificent Seven is full, you might like to give it a go.
We begin with Hank (Dano) positioning his head in a noose while, staring towards the sea from the mouth of a cave, he balances on a battered box. Just too late, he sees a body washed up on his lonely beach.
Hank manages to survive the hanging (or does he?) and runs down to discover that damp Manny (Radcliffe) is no longer among the quick. It would, however, be wrong to suggest he has passed his last breath.
Following its premiere at Sundance earlier this year, Swiss Army Man became known as the "farting corpse movie". That will do well enough as a shorthand summary. Hank mounts Manny and, using the spouting gases as a propellant, heads for somewhere a little more populous.
The vision of Dano riding Radcliffe through the surf promises a zaniness that is soon foresworn for an effort to stir the viewer’s drippy heart. We could do with a lot more of Hank justifying the title by using Manny as a jackhammer or a water fountain. The conversations between the two men are a lot less easy to digest.
Presumably driven mad by solitude, Hank teaches Manny to talk in a stilted, gulped manner that suggests the Creature from Frankenstein. Forced to reduce the complexities of human interaction to simple mantras – the dead man seems a psychological tabula rasa – our protagonist is offered satirical possibilities on which the script refuses to follow through.
Instead, Manny explains how horrid men can be to people who seem a little different. You get a lot of this on Sesame Street.
Struggling to fill up the relatively brief running time, the film then addresses Hank's (slightly creepy) obsession with a woman he once saw on a bus. It is here that Swiss Army Man becomes more Gondry than Gondry at his Gondriest. The two friends build a version of the bus from sticks and set out to re-enact that brief, perfect moment. It's Eternal Sunshine meets Be Kind, Rewind.
Without an actor of Dano’s angular charm, Daniels’s film would be eaten alive by its own conventional quirkiness. Dano throws himself into the part with an enthusiasm that the material scarcely justifies.
And Daniel Radcliffe? Let’s just say that playing a dead man is a task within his limited range. It’s nice to see him making an effort.
I’ve seen worse.
