"A dream within a dream," someone says, and that is the movie summed up in simple words. That's the only simple words I can give you, as there's nothing simple that can be said about this film.
As Anthony Hopkins' first script and one of his few directorial efforts, I was pretty surprised. You expect a Shakespearian such as himself to give you a drama of either a theatrical or independant quality. Instead, Hopkins delivers a straight and hard dose of Lynchian psycho-drama. Anthony Hopkins never would have struck me as an experimental film maker, but he out-Lynchs Lynch on this one. This is Mullholland Dr., but watchable.
As soon as you think the film starts to get on an even keel, there's another paradigm shift and the movie loses you again. It's a web of ideas and thoughts, none necessarily coherent, not always ordered. Hopkins had a mission in making this film and it wasn't for you to understand it. If anything, it was made to assault your senses. To "annoy" you, he said.
In the end, you won't understand what you see and there will only be a few possible outcomes: you'll be intrigued by the ride, you'll be lost and confused, or you'll be angry and contemptful. How you perceive and view the movie is what you'll get out of it, which could range from "everything" to "nothing at all".
As far as the elements themselves, it's an intriguing piece of filmmaking. The technique by which it was crafted and edited is at least worthy of kudos, if nothing else. The script must definitely have been something to see as well and you wonder if this would have ever been made if we weren't talking about Anthony Hopkins. His array of celebrity friends that appear in the movie and deliver excellent performances help bolster the whole thing and make something more out of it than the film school disaster it could have been if it hadn't been Anthony Hopkins making it.
In the end, you get a strange dose of movie satire, experimental filmmaking, and all-out weirdness. You may like it or you may be part of that 90% of people that fucking hate it.
