A confused, aging screenwriter (Anthony Hopkins) finds that he can no longer tell the difference in his life between what is real and what is a movie.

CRITIQUE

Slipstream is a very trippy drama, written, directed by and starring Anthony Hopkins, that seems to be trying to go for a surreal, incoherent, David Lynch sort of thing.  Unfortunately, the result is so incoherent that it is impossible to care about; this is really a mess, and not in a good way.

The basic idea here is that Hopkins is playing a character named Felix Bonhoeffer, who has written a movie called “Slipstream” that is being filled somewhere in Nevada, but which is having production problems that lead to Bonhoeffer to be called out to the set.  But while this sounds straightforward enough, it takes 45 minutes of strange scenes even to get him out there, and even when he does get there, he keeps on going through alternate sorts of realities in which he is there, then somewhere else.

Ultimately it’s unclear what the point of it all is; apparently Bonhoeffer is either crazy or just seeing weird things as he dies, but since the things that happen during the screenplay don’t make much sense at all, it’s impossible to get drawn into it – there just isn’t enough coherence to make us wonder what is going on.

As if deciding that they might as well take it all the way, the filmmakers have also annoyingly edited this, throwing in as many editing tricks they can think of, from cutting in brief flashes of things, to double-exposures, to rewinding and repeating things, to changing from color to black-and-white and back, to speeding the film up or slowing it down.  Unfortunately, this is mostly just headache-inducing, and it does nothing to clarify what is going on, or make it more interesting.

A lot of familiar faces turn up here, including Michael Clarke Duncan and Christian Slater.  But Hopkins too often lets his actors just overact, particularly John Turturro as a movie producer.  The film lurches from genre to genre, and works best when it settles into the semblance of characters and a story.  But every time it does it lurches off again, and ultimately this just doesn’t work well at all.

THE VIDEO

Slipstream is presented in 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen.  A lot of the shots are dark, and though this may have been intentional, it doesn’t help the viewing experience any, and ultimately little here is particularly crisp.

THE AUDIO

Slipstream is presented in English 5.1 Dolby Digital.  Dialogue, music and sound effects come through clear.  There are English and French subtitles.

THE EXTRAS

There is a Commentary with Anthony Hopkins, in which he does clear up the meaning of the script a bit.  He also says (several times) that he isn’t a writer, that he set out to make an anti-movie, and that he doesn’t care if people like it or not.  Which explains a lot, though it makes this movie even less worth seeing.

Dreaming Slipstream is a  15 minute making-of featurette that features Hopkins and the cast of crew talking about the movie, though they try to make it sound like more an interesting jigsaw puzzle than it really is.

There are 12 minutes of Deleted Scenes, two of which are just short Turturro bits, and the third a long draggy conversation in a diner that would have made the film even more ponderous.

FINAL THOUGHT

A third-rate David Lynch knockoff, this is ultimately just a mess.