Paul Dano is to Daniel Radcliffe as Tom Hanks is to a Volleyball

 

Swiss Army Man--a truly postmodern film in all its farty glory. 

Daniel Radcliffe--playing the aerodynamic, flatulent, catapulting corpse called Manny--and Paul Dano--acing as the depressed, socially-outcasted stowaway named Hank--are a dynamic duo that transcend the traditional trope of the troublesome-two pairs often seen in buddy films. 

The idea of a talking corpse is a concept most audience would immediately chalk up to a character hallucination. Hank, having barely survived being stranded on a desert island--most likely malnourished and dehydrated--is, in a normal scenario, low on mental and physical performance/capability. This film is anything but normal. The immediate jump to oh, Hank's just imagining this is reflective of the usually linear direction a film follows. Because A is happening, it points to B, and inevitably C will follow. 

In true postmodern fashion, however, we're left bouncing back and forth. The ending of the film goes to show that Manny might just be both dead and alive (a Schrodinger's cat that you can actually see), but you're never given a firm, definitive answer. That is the magic of magical realism. 

As a literature major, I've encountered my fair share of magical realism stories. The magic in these stories isn't necessarily magic, it just is. It's magic to the readers and audiences because we don't experience anything like that in our world, but it's not questioned in the story because it's an everyday occurrence. Here in Swiss Army Man, it's both. For a brief second, Hank is terrified that a corpse speaks to him. For the remaining 80-something minutes, he doesn't question it. Manny is alive and dead. He just is. I think as audience members, we're conditioned to wonder why this is--curious about Manny's origin, his past, how did he end up here to help Hank. I don't think we're supposed to know. I think the magic is just accepting this strange, odd thing as reality.