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Plenty of Sundance Film Festival chatter surrounded walkouts at Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan's funky comedy-drama, theoretically connected to the role played by flatulence and erections. If that’s the case, it’s hard to imagine people proving a movie’s point quite so spectacularly. It takes some benefit-of-the-doubt-granting to move beyond the basic premise: A man named Hank (Paul Dano), stranded after a boating accident on deserted island, finds potential salvation when a corpse he calls Manny (Daniel Radcliffe) washes ashore, and the body’s intestinal gas powers a journey that may take them to the mainland. Then the body starts talking, and ... stop shaking your head now. Beyond simply being a hilariously bizarre journey, Swiss Army Man uses Manny’s complete naïveté about the human condition to dig into insecurities that keep relationships on a superficial level. “The Daniels” aren’t uniformly successful at keeping their philosophical musings from bumping up against the weirdness, but there's tremendous imagination in their visual style. If you can reveal something profound about the way discomfort leads us to hide ourselves from others, and do so while parading fart and boner jokes, you've got something special going on.
Official Site: swissarmyman.com
Director: Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan
Producer: Jonathan Wang, Lawrence Inglee, Miranda Bailey, Amanda Marshall, Eyal Rimmon, Lauren Mann, Gideon Tadmor, William Olsson and Jim Kaufman
Cast: Paul Dano, Daniel Radcliffe, Mary Winstead, Antonia Ribero, Timothy Eulich, Richard Gross, Marika Casteel, Andy Hull and Aaron Marshall
Director: Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan
Producer: Jonathan Wang, Lawrence Inglee, Miranda Bailey, Amanda Marshall, Eyal Rimmon, Lauren Mann, Gideon Tadmor, William Olsson and Jim Kaufman
Cast: Paul Dano, Daniel Radcliffe, Mary Winstead, Antonia Ribero, Timothy Eulich, Richard Gross, Marika Casteel, Andy Hull and Aaron Marshall
