August 2: And Everything Is Going Fine (2010 -- Steven Soderbergh)

★★★★★

Fourteen years after he last worked with Spalding Gray and six years after the performer’s suicide, Soderbergh created this wonderful documentary.  This is a multi-level film, and I’m glad Criterion has made it available to us.

Formally, the film is like a Gray monologue.  Soderbergh applies his considerable editing skills here (with Susan Littenberg) to link various film fragments into what reads like a 90-minute Gray performance.  The topics here are related just as they are in the other Criterion Soderbergh/Gray project, Gray’s Anatomy, with one topic leading naturally into the other.  It's an interesting formal experiment that works.

And Everything is Going Fine also follows a chronological order, starting with Gray discussing his childhood and moving on ultimately to scenes of him after his accident in Ireland.  But the key to the film--and what makes is so impressive--is the way Soderbergh sequences Gray's comments on art and on suffering/death.  As we move chronologically though his life, we hear Gray’s description of his mother and her suicide, we hear of his therapy and we hear about his art.  Gray repeatedly comes back to the point that his art is an effort to create order and his own identity out of chaos, even saying he starts acting and then telling stories because his life is otherwise chaos.  We hear him call himself a chaos man who comes into being only through the art of storytelling.  Ultimately, a completely random accident in Ireland leaves Gray crippled, and the film suggests this last lash by Chaos was as much as Gray could bear; Gray's suicide shortly afterwards was the triumph of Chaos, the loss of art, order and self.  The beauty of And Everything is Going Fine is that the filmmaker, and those of us who see the film, can have some insight into the psychic tension that Gray grew up with, lived with, and created art to cope with. 

And Everything is Going Fine works on many levels, and Soderbergh brings both his cinematic skill and his intellect to bear on Gray.  This little film, unique among the Soderbergh work I’ve seen, is one of my favorites by this director.