Hopkins Seeks Consciousness over Plot
Review by Alan Steinfeld

Slipstream like the title foreshadowed came and slipstreamed out of the theaters with hardly a notice.  But this was a tour-de-force of our very own Anthony Hopkins.  What marks film as most interesting is that it is Hollywood’s final recognition of non linearity, although Charles Kaufman has been doing this for years. Non linearity, meaning what the French director John Luc-Goddard said: “A story can should have a beginning, middle and an end; but not necessarily in that order.”

But I have the feeling there are very few people who will understand the serious effort that Hopkins intended as this picture’s director. No one else could have ripped the guts out of Hollywood in such an expressive way than one of its own.  

Writer, director and lead actor of Slipstream Hopkins gives us a post-modern tribute to the life a Hollywood player. “It is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothings,” which I think is exactly Hopkins’ point--- All the hoopla around major motion pictures, their stars, the glamour --ultimately does not amount to a hill of beans.  But something real exists in the making; in those snap shot moments where we catch a glimpse of human emotion.

 If Shakespeare were writing today he would have said; “Life is a movie.”  For Hopkins, like all of us, we are the actors, writers and directors of the production called “Our Life”.  I don’t think I would be giving too much away to say that the movie ends when the main character dies.

Essentially Hopkins tears up the linear progression - slashes it back together again and leaves all the loose ends dangling.  This plotless plot is about a writer that has gone cracked pot and has externalized his inner world.  Since the writer/star is Hopkins we can’t help but feel we are getting a direct look into his deeper psyche.  In press notes the maestro Anthony says:  “...every moment just slips past.  What is real?  What is fantasy?  You grasp this moment and then suddenly, it’s gone.  I was talking 10 minutes ago but that’s all gone, it’s all a dream.”

In this Slipstream consciousness Hopkins attempts to make a poetic statement about the nature of his own fabricated existence.  In a Bunelian, Daliesque landscape of the mind he jumps between many levels of reality.  For instance:  Stella Arroyave, Hopkins’ own wife, plays his character’s wife playing an actor in the film he has written that he has actually written. BTW Arroyave is a spectacular presence, a real natural talent and beauty, although this seems to be her first film role.
 
To frame it in more contemporary terms this film is a hybrid between Being John Mallkovich and Pulp Fiction. For as both Charles Kaufman and Quentin Terentino have shown that it is not continuity that matters, but the singularity of intensity, passion and expression. Here Hopkins does one better by keeping the whole pace of the film very mundane and in a way simple.  In order to make any sense of the film just see one moment at a time.

This point is especially brought home in a comical commentary when the script supervisor on the film that Hopkins is writing is killed and then haunts Hopkins to be brought back to life or else he will have no continuity.  Well this is exactly what happens as the pages from the script blow across the desolate desert set.

A recurring theme throughout is the reference to the 1956 movie, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with a haunting cameo performance by that film’s star, Kevin McCarthy.  Is Hopkins saying that a life of an actor is like a demonic possession that masquerades as a human being?  It seems his perceptions of Hollywood is exactly what most people have suspected; superficial, ego driven, and self-indulgence.  John Turturro’s usual over-the-top performance seems very appropriate in playing a big shot maniacal producer backing the film Hopkins’ character Felix Bonhoeffer has written and is re-writing.

As Eugene Ionesco said, and this movie is a tribute to his absurdist perspective: “A work of art really is above all an adventure of the mind.” Essentially Hopkins is expressing his alienation from a world and system of filmmaking that has so lost the value of what reality truly is.  What Hopkins gives us is not Hollywood, but the true life of the mind that is looking for coherence in a chaotic world of plastic fabrication.

For mainstream this is extreme and advant gaard -in the original sense of the word, but as a piece of visual poetics, Slipstream well worth seeing.  Like Abraham Lincoln said about séances in the Whitehouse: “For people who like that sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they will like.”


Alan Steinfeld is founder of NewRealities and has been the moderator of many New Life Expo panels. He is also the host of the popular spiritual cable program New Realities and has recently started an online service for holistic events around New York.  Please contact This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it