Swiss Army Man

In Swiss Army Man, the actor best known for playing Harry Potter plays a flatulent corpse.

Does that sound like something you'd be interested in?

I didn't think I would be, not even after hearing some glowing reviews of the film after it screened at Sundance. It would probably be too esoteric to make much of a dent in the popular consciousness; at best it would turn out to be one of those movies that is more appreciated than beloved.

And maybe for the first 15 or 20 minutes that's exactly what it is -- an extended none-too-subtle joke about how human bodies stick around after the person associated with them has ended. But then Swiss Army Man takes a surprising turn and becomes a wonderfully heartfelt meditation on what it means to become human and how we ought to cherish our sentient moments. It becomes a movie about what it means to have free will. It becomes beautiful.

Paul Dano, an actor who has a gift for conveying tenderness while oscillating between mania and depression, plays Hank, a man who has somehow marooned himself on a small island somewhere in the Pacific. Maybe Hank sailed off with the intention of killing himself, but if so he's had second thoughts. While he's sent out messages pleading for rescue, as the movie opens he's resigned to his fate. He's prepared to hang himself when he notices a man in a business suit who's washed up on the beach.

As it turns out, the dude (Daniel Radcliffe) is dead. And, as corpses often are, flatulent. But Hank ingeniously discovers that he can work with this stiff. Using the body as a jet ski, they make it back to the mainland. But they're not out of the woods yet.

Hank discovers that his new friend has many uses -- he can be deployed like the tool referenced in the title. He can provide fresh water. His limbs can be used to snap tree branches. And, miraculously, Hank discovers he's able to teach Manny, as he's dubbed the dead guy, to talk.

While writer-directors Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert -- who work together as Daniels and are known for their short films and music videos (they are culpable for DJ Snake/Lil Jon's "Turn Down for What" video) -- pack a lot of interesting philosophy into their debut feature's gorgeous middle section, it's probably better for audiences to discover the film themselves than to read what Hank's repurposing a Bible into a version of the children's book Everybody Poops is about. This is a film that delights in and transcends its scatological details, and it addresses the strange ways of humankind and the inherent weirdness of being alive.

There is a minor deflation when the boys get back to civilization and Manny once again resumes inertness. It comes dangerously close to the spell-breaking suggestion that what we've just seen has played out in Hank's head. And many will find the film's final seconds less satisfying than what's come before.

Still, this is a warm and inventive movie that owes a debt to the imaginative sorties of Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman while remaining singularly imaginative. The cinematography by Larkin Seiple is lush and evocative, turning the small ($3 million) budget into a virtue. And the way music threads through the characters and into the ether, binding them together, and to the universe, is life-affirming.

MovieStyle on 07/01/2016