MOVIE REVIEW

Fragmented story gets lost in 'Slipstream'

Anthony Hopkins' stream-of-consciousness technique in showing a man losing a grip on reality doesn't really work.

By Carina Chocano
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

October 26, 2007

The first few minutes of "Slipstream," written and directed by Anthony Hopkins (who also stars), are equally devoted to the deconstruction of the cinematic image and the thorough bafflement of the viewer. The movie opens on a jumble of jump cuts and flash frames, flipped frames, grease-penciled splice marks and random quickie insert shots of Bette Davis, Adolf Hitler and napalmed Vietnamese babies.

Things eventually alight on a narrative thread -- an older man who appears to be a Hollywood type of some kind lunches with a young actress, then ends up on a deadlocked freeway where a man goes on a shooting spree -- but it doesn't stay there for long.

The premise hinges on the idea that a screenwriter named Felix Bonhoeffer (Hopkins) starts to have trouble discerning fantasy from reality, past from present, memories from dreams from media images etched in his brain. The movie he's working on appears to be taking on aspects of other, older movies, and of his life, which unbeknownst to him is nearing its end.

"Slipstream" is an experiment in visual stream-of-consciousness, but stream-of-consciousness fares better as a literary form than a cinematic one, possibly because the "Parallax View"-style atrocity montage has long been such a favorite among film students, possibly because literary stream-of-consciousness better mirrors the thought process.

Taking a cue from David Lynch, Hopkins fractures the narrative from the first frame, but unlike Lynch he doesn't go far enough in establishing a context from which to deviate. If the story fragments we're watching spring from the same mind, in other words, it's not obvious.

Nobody who has been in the movie business for as long as Hopkins is without his or her crazy behind-the-scenes stories and deep reserves of whatever -- frustration, wonder, amazement -- at the business and all the people in it.

In the movie's media materials Hopkins says that what has always interested him is what happens when the director yells "cut." This, evidently, is a feeling many actors have, judging by the number of films made by actors about the movie business. But artfully conveying the experience in all its absurdity and meaninglessness is different than embodying the absurdity and meaninglessness. "Slipstream" doesn't remotely make the leap from the latter to the former, despite the appearance of such actors as Christian Slater as an unhinged actor, John Turturro as an even more unhinged producer and Camryn Manheim as a script supervisor.