Review of And Everything Is Going Fine (2010) by Julia C — 12 Dec 2010

On the subway to see the touching and funny movie "And Everything Is Going Fine," I noticed a lot of people wearing holiday costumes which I had never seen before and most of them seemed to get off at my stop. A friend thought this might have something to do with a massive pub crawl which a lot of crazy behavior including a slide down a bannister at the World Trade Center Path station would seemingly confirm.

Now this is the kind of story that Spalding Gray(1941-2004) would tell in his monologues in front of an audience, while sitting down at a table with maybe a glass of water or a notebook.(For "Monster in a Box," he had the mother of all unfinished manuscripts. I still would like to know about the Playboy magazine, by the way.) Like a lot of people, I came to his work through the film "Swimming to Cambodia," a wonderful retelling of his experiences in a small part in "The Killing Fields." As one reviewer noted, "never had so much been made of so little." And I was lucky to see him perform "Gray's Anatomy" and "It's a Slippery Slope" in person at Lincoln Center.

With "And Everything Is Going Fine," Steven Soderbergh(he directed Gray in "King of the Hill" and filmed "Gray's Anatomy") stitch them together in a single autobiographical narrative with additional talks where Gray is interviewed and he interviews other people, including one where he talks with his father. Through it all, Gray proves his enormous talent in detailing the everyday experiences of people he came across. Of deeper interest is the therapeutic service the monologues may have served him as his mother's mental illness and suicide hangs over him, allowing him to explore the subject of depression which is so rarely talked about.