Spalding Gray’s new film, “And Everything Is Going Fine,” is 89 minutes long. What a coincidence! That’s exactly 89 more minutes of Spalding Gray than I can stand.
Gray was a motormouthed small-time actor who (largely thanks to incessant cheerleading from the New York Times) achieved mild 1980s fame as an autobiographical “monologuist,” which is to say that he was not funny enough to be a comic and not enough of a wordsmith to be an author. Films of his droning and digressive 90-minute lectures, such as “Swimming to Cambodia,” are unfortunate for their emphasis on a single topic — his fascination with himself — because the sentiment is difficult to share.
In “And Everything Is Going Fine,” director Steven Soderbergh assembles without comment or narration an anthology of clips of Gray’s act over the years as he heads for the edge he would later jump off. The laziness of this filmmaking (which assumes you know that Gray killed himself in 2004) is of a piece with the emphatically uninteresting tales told by a classic dinner-party bore who once referred to his ramblings as “creative narcissism.” He was half-right.