Gray Matter

Steven Soderbergh’s new film does not ask: But who was Spalding Gray, really? That’s a nonstarter, if only because the act of asking is best left to Gray himself.

Yes: an act, a bit of business, somewhere between performance art and personal literature, by which the audacity of sitting alone at a table on a stage and telling stories of self was refined into art. In those cozy, dark hours just before the dawn of our era of online oversharing, Gray was the last great confessionalist.

And Everything Is Going Fine

gets its title from an ironic leitmotif in one of Gray’s many monologues, whose intimacy and singularity the film has been designed to evoke. It’s a scrapbook of archival Spalding Gray materials—performances, interviews, home movies—arranged by Soderbergh and editor Susan Littenberg with affection and good intuition. The images accrue not chronologically but in Graylike narrative zigzags—we see him getting older and younger and older again, moving through fluctuations of flannel and coif and footage formats. But the bigger picture, the story of his life, makes its way from a beginning toward an end. It’s the perfect one-man show: eccentric, hilarious and only boring to those already predisposed against him.

A peculiar but cherished cultural figure was this doomed, delectably artful digresser. He was like a different make of David Foster Wallace—the tone of his voice both intellectual and vernacular, the subject both himself and everything, the suicide both impossible and inevitable.

The film does not directly acknowledge that Gray took his own life—that he did so is the consensus, anyway—in 2004, at age 62. It seems to presume that anyone who would be watching already knows this and will not be able to forget it. (Thus does hindsight become foreshadowing: We learn, among other things, that a dose of Sigmund Freud at an impressionable age got Gray in a mild panic expecting his unconscious would compel him to throw himself out a window, and that he took his role in Soderbergh’s

King of the Hill

partly in order to explore a suicide fantasy.)

Expository concerns are handled as Gray handled them: discursively, yet forthrightly. There is no narration, except of course his own. Aptly enough, it is all Gray all the time. The only character witnesses are his occasional interviewers and even more occasional interviewees—whose ranks include strangers gathered up from his audience and his own father.

Gray recounts his experiments with sex, theater, family and fame. He charts the cultivation of what he called both “creative narcissism” and “poetic journalism.” He says, “I like telling the story of life better than I like living it.”

Santa Fe Reporter