Why 'Swiss Army Man' Is The Farting Corpse Movie The World Has Been Waiting For

SWISS ARMY MAN

If you’re going to be known as ‘the farting corpse movie’ — as Swiss Army Man is — then you can’t be coy. Merely showing the excretion of gases during putrefaction isn’t enough to earn such a mantle, such an honour, such infamy. If you wanna be the farting corpse movie, then you better legit bring a farting corpse. And Swiss Army Man brings a farting corpse. Does it ever. It’s no surprise that it became this year’s critically-acclaimed Sundance breakout: it’s the farting corpse movie the world has been waiting for. It is, without hyperbole, the greatest farting corpse movie ever. It is the farting corpse movie by which all other farting corpse movies will now be measured.

Playing this farting corpse is none other than Daniel Radcliffe. The symbol of childhood — and, y’know, actual — magic for an entire generation, here Radcliffe casts a different kind of spell. He still has magical powers, only this time he wields not a wand, but a trouser trumpet. The film opens with Paul Dano, stranded on deserted island, noose hung from a cave, ready to end his life. Yet, at the moment he takes his final leap, he sees a body washed up on the beach. The corpse saves his life, in so many ways: interrupting his suicide attempt, rescuing him from his hopeless isolation, and, eventually, teaching him to live. And the corpse does this through the wonder of farts.

Harnessing the power of Radcliffe’s amazing anus, Dano rides him like a fart-propelled jet-ski back to land; where the pair are no longer stranded on a desert isle, but lost in the woods. There, Dano discovers that his new corpse companion is like a utility tool: useful for fresh water, for chopping wood, for lighting fires, and for pointing the way back home with the divining rod inside his trousers (note: Swiss Army Man is also the greatest ‘animatronic boner compass’ movie ever). Soon enough, we’re deep into a surrealist buddy-movie bromance, with Dano teaching Radcliffe — who, in his farting corpse form, has forgotten everything — about time, the universe, society, storytelling, whilst Radcliffe teaches Dano about friendship, love, life. The moral of the story: that keeping your farts a shameful secret is tantamount to hiding your humanity.

Swiss Army Man seeks to be an existential study — everything called into question; mankind seen through the eyes of the outsider — but it’s, really, a film about films. Writer/directors Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan (who’re billed as “Daniels”) wheel out cinematic tropes only to contort them in playful, oft-flatulent ways. They evoke Weekend At Bernie’s, Castaway, Gerry. There are recurring references, in conversation, imagery, and score, to Jurassic Park. And, eventually, in his role as teacher, Dano constructs a shadow-puppet theatre and restages Jurassic Park, E.T., Titanic.

In all these filmic references, Swiss Army Man is reminiscent of last year’s critically-acclaimed Sundance breakout, Alfonso Gómez-Rejón’s Me And Earl And The Dying Girl. Farting corpse movies and teen cancer weepies don’t seem like obvious bedfellows, but each is about emotionally-retarded young men learning, with help from an unexpected sidekick (farting corpse vs Magical Negro: discuss), what it means to care for another person. But, moreso, they share the same sensibility: this male loner finding solace in a wacky DIY-verse of cutesy dioramas and Sweded cinematic recreations, each heavy on the reverence to Michel Gondry and Wes Anderson.

"Ultimately, Swiss Army Man demands recommendation. For its chutzpah, its brazenness, and its ridiculousness..."

But, where Me And Earl And The Dying Girl stuck its transformation into something emotionally-wrought, Swiss Army Man’s own attempts at tilting from irony towards profundity aren’t quite as stirring. Here, it happens as Radcliffe’s growing grasp of human behaviour and human nature (or, to get Gondryist, Human Behaviour and Human Nature) means that he has to understand selfishness, double-standards, darkness. As it progresses, the pic plays like a relationship drama, duly navigating insecurities. When Dano — whose performance is rich in pathos, his tender sadness kept in sublime contrast to the film’s wackiness — says “the more you see of me, the less you’re going to like me,” it’s an instant of true ache in a largely-smirking film.

Once it hints at profundity, Swiss Army Man can only really turn back towards absurdity: its own moral compass, a boner; its identity, a farting corpse movie. When it ends with an inspirational finale, it’s played for irony; its final cinematic reference, to Free Willy, its least sincere. What Scheinert and Kwan are attempting to do — to make an ironic riff on convention that is, in its own way, an auteurist vision of the human condition — is incredibly ambitious, and that they don’t quite pull it off hardly makes it a failure. As, ultimately, Swiss Army Man demands recommendation. For its chutzpah, its brazenness, and its ridiculousness, sure; but mostly for its singularity. If you only see one farting corpse movie this year, this has to be the one.

SING STREET

Before he was known for being a dick to Keira Knightley, director John Carney’s rep was as the guy who made films about music. 2007’s Once, shot guerrilla-style on the streets of Dublin with future Swell Season lovers Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, found magic by capturing both music and emotions in the moment of creation. 2013’s Hollywood-crossover, Begin Again, however, found no magic, only contrivance; ol’ Knightboat herself trying to ‘make it in New York’, in a clichéd vision of the music industry, armed only with some shitty songs.

Sing Street finds Carney returning to Dublin, and to his own youth: depicting a bunch of kids putting together a band at a rough-and-tumble boy’s-school in 1985. There’s plentiful coming-of-age clichés and some more shitty songs — though, this time, they’re deliberately so — but there’s a sense of infectiousness, too; largely radiating from the youthful cast, all of whom seem excited to be here. That energy is offset by a dark motif of suffering, of abuse at both personal and institutional levels. It’s telling that the heroic, ’80s-teen-movie-aping rockshow finale finds its climactic song dedicated, in defiance, to “every Christian brother and bully”. Sing Street is, essentially, a bright-eyed, cockeyed portrait of beating back the world’s darkness with the innocent hope of youthful dreams.

OUR KIND OF TRAITOR

If you like your spy-thrillers perfectly-competent, then Our Kind Of Traitor is for you. It introduces us to Ewan McGregor and Naomie Harris, bookish Londoners on a let’s-save-our-marriage holiday in Marrakech, then immediately puts them in the orbit of Stellan Skarsgård’s Russian mobster. In a classic Hitchcockian sting — though one cribbed from the pages of spy-thriller icon John le Carré — McGregor soon becomes the in-over-his-head every-man roped into a world of espionage, blackmail, and double-crossing.

It’s rote stuff that barrels along, inevitably, towards a shoot-out, to a notion of ultimate justice served. There’s pan-European locations shown as glittering tourist-board scenery, with city names duly teletyped on screen. International intrigue essentially becomes a great marital aid — this is the spark their passions have been lacking — and moral proving ground; McGregor’s hero’s journey one long penance for having ever been anything less than a decent man.

The performances — especially Damian Lewis as a smug MI6 prick — are all top-shelf, Anthony Dod Mantle’s cinematography sparkles, and director Susanna White (whose only previous feature was, um, 2010’s Nanny McPhee Returns) does well in blessing seemingly banal situations with a sense of menace; here games of tennis or watching the football bristle with unease. But, for all its handsomeness and tautness, Our Kind Of Traitor never rises above its genre; never becomes anything more than a well-executed exercise in familiar form.