Review of And Everything Is Going Fine (2010) by Kenneth L — 19 Dec 2012

This was my first exposure to Spalding Gray, but it seems like it contains most of what I would need to know about him. Gray was an actor known for one-man monologue stage shows, where he would just sit at a table and tell stories about his life.

He performed many of these shows over the course of his life. This film, made by Steven Soderbergh in the wake of Gray's suicide (which is never actually mentioned) is composed entirely of footage of Gray.

Most of the footage is taken from various monologue shows over the years, and the rest comes from interviews and occasionally home movies. The movie doesn't exactly say, but judging from his appearance and so on, I would guess the footage spans about thirty years or so of Gray's life.

He is certainly an engaging storyteller, which accounts for the popularity of the shows. There's a bit of a My Dinner with Andre aspect to both Gray and the movie, and indeed he even mentions Andre Gregory at one point.

Gray's life is interesting, even though he himself does not always come across as the most sympathetic; in a lot of ways, he seems like your typical dissolute, bohemian, narcissistic artist. But he's at least self-aware enough to acknowledge that in his telling of the stories.

The film is edited in such a way to make all the transitions between different sources fairly seamless. Overall, this was obviously a fairly light and minor project for Soderbergh, but it works well on its own terms, and you learn a lot about Spalding Gray.