A big effort from one man in this piece of work, Anthony Hopkins wrote, directed (his third directional effort), composed the music, and stars in the film that intertwines reality with a writers befuddled mind. Before I watched it, I had read a brief paragraph from an interview with Hopkins who stated that he was unhappy with Hollywood, and that it was “getting under his skin”. He seems to want to say something of his own making, and Slipstream is the vehicle for his statement, in his own words and actions!
Having inherited a troubled film which he is told to ‘fix’, script writer Felix Bonhoeffer (Hopkins), bleeds the characters his is working with, into a seeming reality, in fact the greater part of the movie is set inside of Felix’s head. The film is a film within a film, with more than just a nod to the much better Mulholland Drive from David Lynch, the direction by Hopkins seems as confused as the characters and the narrative. He appears to be trying as many styles as he can to make the set pieces suggest a deeper meaning, but none surfaces, or if it did it missed me completely. Scenes in black and white, objects changing colour as we watch, characters depicted in different timelines that caught me completely unawares a couple of times, and what might be thought of as Felix’s dying flashback experiences.
I’m never happy when I watch a film and find myself working hard at trying to determine what it is saying. In this case, I have a notion that it does not actually say anything at all, it might well have started out with good intentions, but when unwound, like the movie that the character Felix found messed up in the first place, it has nowhere good to go in the journey it takes. A surreal concoction of images interspersed with Ray (Christian Slater) as a hit man and his sidekick Geek (Jeffrey Tambor), and some hi jinks in various locations is not a movie as much as a bad daydream, or a waking nightmare for the paying customer.
3.5/10, Not worthy of the ambition of Hopkins himself, it tries too much to be avant-garde and ends up being a vain attempt at mixing a pseudo reality with consciousness movie, with a side helping of historically derived images. Stick to acting Sir Anth…….