Soderbergh: And Everything Is Going Fine (2010)

Along with a handful of other directors in the late 80s and early 90s, Steven Soderbergh filmed one of Spalding Gray’s celebrated monologues, as Gray’s Anatomy. In addition, he cast him in one of his first feature-length productions, King Of The Hill. Some twenty years later, in the wake of Gray’s apparent suicide in 2004, Soderbergh set himself a more ambitious task – a personal and professional biopic of Gray. Or, rather, an autobiopic, since Gray’s life and career was nothing if not an extended autobiography, an autobiography set in the present tense, told as it was lived. To that end, Soderbergh restricts the film to archival footage, most of which is taken from Gray’s live shows and interviews. True to his career as a monologuist, the only other voices in the film are occasional or incidental, shaping and contouring his splendid isolation, to the point where it would play as a filmed performance were it not for the tact and discrimination with which Soderbergh collates and curates his material. Specifically, Soderergh chooses to present Gray's anecdotes chronologically, from his tempestuous childhood to the events that precipitated his final depression, while taking those anecdotes from all over his career. That gives the impression of an extraordinarily kaleidoscopic life, a life that changed a little each time it was told. More than that, it makes you realise how much of Gray’s life was actually lived on the stage, at the desks where he delivered his trademark brand of sit-down comedy. Taking his cues from Gray's insistence on timing and detail - well-timed detail - Soderbergh pores overs the small objects that furnished Gray’s sparse stages, as well as the small tics that made his Waspy solipsism so homely to his audiences, until Gray has simply become those tics and objects, vanished into his monologues, which become more and more self-effacing as they evolve. And that’s probably the truest way to tell his story, or to allow him to tell it for a final time – the perfect tribute to a visionary who “liked telling the story of his life better than living it.”