SFFS Screen: And Everything Is Going Fine February 18, 2011

When Spalding Gray . . . began performing his autobiographical monologues in the late 1970s and early ’80s—first as a member of the Wooster Group, then on his own—they felt radical and revelatory, like bulletins from newly discovered artistic territory. By 2004, when Gray committed suicide by jumping from the Staten Island Ferry, his work was a familiar and widely appreciated feature of the cultural landscape. He made occasional appearances in movies, television series and conventional plays, but his great role, his great project, was himself. . . . Now Soderbergh has assembled a biographical tribute that is also a sampler of Gray’s performances, formal and otherwise. The film, And Everything Is Going Fine (the highly ironic title comes from a monologue excerpted in the film), is, among other things, a tour de force of smart and sensitive editing. Drawing on recordings of stage appearances, television interviews with MTV and Charlie Rose and other videotaped conversations, this documentary is as digressive and, miraculously, as coherent as the monologues that are its principal inspiration. —A.O. Scott, New York Times

Official Website: http://www.sffs.org/content.aspx?catid=8,59&pageid=2064