When you boil it down – which is not a bad idea – Swiss Army Man is a film about a blatant kind of human exploitation. Marooned on an island somewhere in the middle of a vast ocean, Hank (Paul Dano) is about to hang himself when he spots a body where the water laps at the beach. Hank's suicide attempt fails; he runs to the body (Daniel Radcliffe), only to surmise that it's not quite dead, because it suddenly farts, the kind that will send an 11-year-old boy laughing into the next decade.
Manny, as the body is called, never quite comes to full-fledged life. He's more of an automaton with a glassy-eyed expression. His head flops, his body makes odd, dys-rhythmic movements – again of a kind to send young boys into titters of ecstatic giggling.
Hank harnesses the oddities of Manny's body on what seems to be a parched desert like island. Manny's mouth gushes fresh drinkable water, Hank shoots pebbles from Manny's mouth like a machine gun, and Hank uses Manny's inexhaustible gas as a propellant.
The pair recall Pozzo and his slave Lucky from Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, yet Manny is less than a slave; he's a kind of an appliance, as in not really human. Like the title, Manny is a tool with many odd attachments. Swiss Army Man never gets to the level of Beckett's sense of absurdity, though, because co-filmmakers Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert don't have the discipline to let the weirdness stand blunt and stark on its own. They get soft and sentimental.
Throughout the film, I kept looking for the metaphorical reach. Swiss Army Man yearns to be more than slapstick comedy. It struggles to make itself profound, but ends up rather unhappily empty and cloying. You want the film to stick to its guns and picture a world that really is as vast and empty and inexplicable as the opening shot of the ocean. But when Hank and Manny become earnest with each other, and when the father stuff appears, the film can't tell the difference between philosophy and self-pity.
Hank has a cellphone that shows the audience that it's down to ten percent power and ominously has "no service." You want the movie to work its metaphors, and to understand how this great technological miracle embodies the ironies of a civilization that talks much and communicates little.
But Swiss Army Man is not that movie.
Reports from the Sundance Film Festival indicate the audience was passionately divided. The film won the directing award, but the movie seems like a major example of The Emperor's New Clothes. It's great to do outlandish things, to surprise and maybe shock an audience, but what's called originality, on its own, doesn't count for enough. If you want to play in the big leagues, those original things have to relate to each other somehow; they have to build on each other and be shaped into something beyond a simple list of oddities.
People have been entranced by Lucky and Pozzo since 1953. No one has yet exhausted the possibilities for what these two characters suggest. They're not just connected literally by a rope, and mired in the act of waiting with two other men; they've also entangled themselves ferociously in the minds of nearly everyone who's seen or read Waiting for Godot.
By the end of Swiss Army Man, you're left knowing that you've seen some things that you don't often see in movies – but so what? Neither Daniel Radcliffe's catatonia nor Paul Dano's moony looks invite you inside them or their place. They're just things that for an hour and a half you look at.
The movie may be – in its way – a good fart joke, but it's still just a fart joke.
