Having just finished watching Slipstream, a film written and directed by Anthony Hopkins, I find myself recalling Sophomore creative writing classes. And, like a sophomoric exploration of concepts too large for short stories, Slipstream plods through a meandering space-time voyage that starts nowhere and ends in nothing.The plot (barely) follows the mind of fictional screenwriter persona Felix Boenhoeffer. This should have been the first tip off of a poor movie: It's about a writer. As every writer in the history of man has ever done, eventually the time comes when they look inward at their own creative processes and think it would be a good idea to write a story about it. What develops from these explanatory endeavors unfailingly results in a sloppy narrative with confusing and esoteric philosophic tangents. The most simple philosophy, however, is this: Creativity is chaotic. Stories are not.
By definition, stories require structure, and the tendency of writers exploring the chaos of creation within a story is to let the chaos take free reign. Unfortunately, Mr. Hopkins fell prey to this tendency as well. The finished product plays like a bad editing job of a film student's first attempt at screenwriting. Sepia tones, rewind sections, interspliced scene blips, all interrupting a narrative that is barely more thought-out or directed than a home movie. Of course, part of this clumsiness is intentional, as Mr. Hopkins himself has said in interviews regarding the film. He wished to "poke fun" at Hollywood film-making techniques. The joke is on Mr. Hopkins, however, as he manages to confuse "poking fun" with "beating a dead horse."
Indeed, the entire film suffers from the dead-horse syndrome, continually clubbing the viewer over the head with thinly-veiled commentary in filmed scenes that repeat over and over in different colors or speeds or with different inner monologue. We get it, the film is stream-of-consciousness. But you know what isn't fun? Watching senile stream-of-consciousness that forgets where it's gone before. And worse, in the end, the film tells us nothing we didn't know already or haven't seen expressed better: Reality is a matter of perception and actors lead weird double false/real lives. Ho hum.
Reportedly, audiences at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival were left confused and wondering about the real meaning of the movie. For anyone still uncertain, let me confirm this for you: It doesn't have one. It's a juvenile piece of metafiction that doesn't even provoke any thought in the viewer. Except, of course, the thought, "Wow, what a bad movie." Surely not what one would expect from such a distinguished and experienced actor as Mr. Hopkins.
In the end, Slipstream is such a shoddy film that I can't even give it a proper rating on the star-scale. Instead, like a second-grade teacher dealing with a slow student's first essay, I give Slipstream 1 gold sticky star for effort and then quietly toss it in the trashcan.
