If you can't remember the title for this film at the box office, ask for "the farting corpse movie." Or, if offbeat bad taste isn't your must-see, take my advice and skip the hot mess altogether.
"Swiss Army Man," a surreal gross-out comedy, opens with Hank (Paul Dano), seemingly shipwrecked and all alone, in the midst of a suicide attempt. He puts his self-destruction on pause when he sees a beached cadaver played by Daniel Radcliffe onshore. Though he's (apparently) a stiff, he (apparently) chats quite a bit, which makes him amiable company.
He also expels gas like a sonic boom, continuously in fact, making him a handy tool. Dano uses him as a flatulent Jet Ski, an air-powered anal bazooka, a high-pressure water hose and much more. Not remembering his name, the corpse calls himself Manny.
Hank and Manny become soul mates, Dano supplying a polite counterpoint to Radcliffe's tics and unfocused hundred-yard gaze. Not remembering his past, Manny asks Hank to explain virtually everything about human life. Hank replies by turning the island's scraps into a slapdash facsimile of his own experiences. He cobbles together a make-believe bus, impersonates his faraway dream lady (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and details the fine points of unrequited love and masturbation.
All the reality checks lead Hank to confront his own lonely white-male geek coming of age tendencies, the standard focus of emotional indie hipster comedy.
The essential story resembles a bromance suffering from Tourette's syndrome. Both partners are oxygen-deprived in their own way, each is kept alive by Hank's ongoing explanations of how humans cope with the predicaments of the world and each other.
The film, which debuted to widespread audience groans at this year's Sundance Film Festival, has a rare degree of go-for-broke weirdness, and not in a good way. Dano and Radcliffe deserve admiration for tackling their bizarre characters, and Winstead introduces a touching level of pathos. But they're ill served by co-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, who make ironic air-quotes frame every quirky line reading, story beat and performing gesture.
As the film progresses, its tone darkens, suggesting that everything that happens in the film, right up to its pseudo-profound catharsis, is a shaggy dog story from a very unreliable narrator. It's the sort of bait-and-switch finale that only works for a film that's more than partially clever and mildly funny.
