And Everything Is Going Fine -- Film Review

9:05 PM PDT 10/14/2010 by John DeFore

AUSTIN -- Made almost exclusively from his own words, "And Everything Is Going Fine" nevertheless constructs an oral autobiography unlike those for which Spalding Gray was famous during his lifetime -- one bound together by no thematic conceit or metaphor-rich biographical episode, focused instead on capturing the full arc of the performer's life. A valuable coda to the storyteller's cinematic legacy, it doesn't have the pull of "Swimming to Cambodia" but should be embraced by those who followed Gray's career and were saddened by its early end.

Director Steven Soderbergh, who cast Gray in the feature King of the Hill and made the performance film Gray's Anatomy, digs through the archives here, drawing on often low-quality videotape of stage performance throughout Gray's career to stitch together a mostly linear narrative of his life. From his Christian Science upbringing in a Rhode Island clapboard house (when Gray says they kept garden tools in the barn out back, his accent makes it "God an' tools") to the aftermath of the 2001 car accident that began his decline, the film touches on Gray's family history, his unlikely introduction to the stage, the way constant self-exposure colored his personal relationships, and the turn his life took when he accidentally became a father.