Gray's Anatomy

Steven Soderbergh's 1996 film adapts the monologuist Spalding Gray's stage show. Gray recounts his search through alternative medicine for a condition in his eye called macular pucker: nutritionists, psychic surgeons in the Philippines, a Native American sweat lodge. The account is funny, with fear of death and loss of control underneath it. Soderbergh refuses to make a record of the stage show; he builds a different visual apparatus for each section, changing light and background constantly, so Gray speaks sometimes underwater and sometimes inside a storm. That formal play is a bold answer to the question of how to hold a one-man monologue in a cinema. Gray's suicide in 2004 makes the film heavier in retrospect. Who it's for: viewers interested in monologue cinema, Spalding Gray's work and Soderbergh's experimental period. Who it's not for: anyone who will struggle to watch one person talk for ninety minutes, or not reckoning that the medical detail can be uncomfortable.