And Everything is Going Fine opens at the TIFF Bell Lightbox
March 12th, 2011 by Alex | Co-Editor
Where: TIFF Bell Lightbox
When: Daily at 3:45PM, 6PM and 8:15PM (1:45PM on some days). Check the website for detailed schedules.
Tickets: At the TIFF website or in-person at the box office for the theatre. Be sure to show your TCard for a special student discount.
More Information: See the And Everything is Going Fine page on the TIFF site.
Back in May, BlogUT picked Steven Soderbergh’s documentary, And Everything is Going Fine as one of the must-see films at HotDocs. So I was delighted to find out that the TIFF Bell Lightbox programmers decided to release the film for a short run so that it can gain a bigger audience (and further promote the awesome prescience that BlogUT has been come to be known for). If you missed it during HotDocs, be sure to check it out now. Here’s the original review of the film from the HotDocs 2010 coverage at BlogUT.
Steven Soderbergh’s film, And Everything is Going Fine, is a continuation of Soderbergh’s obsession with the actor/performer Spaulding Gray. Soderbergh madeGray’s Anatomy in 1996, which was an eighty-minute film version of one of Gray’s monologues. And Everything is Gone Fine is essentially a mash-up of old recordings of Gray’s various monologue performances interspersed with the occasional personal interview (between, presumably, Soderbergh and Gray) and television interview.
Spalding Gray is a fascinating storyteller who uses stories from his own life as fodder for – or, rather, exact material for – his stage performances, which usually take the form of ninety minute monologues. Soderbergh cuts together a myriad of these stories to give a fairly good and broad picture of Spalding Gray the storyteller and the man. The intent behind the interviews seems to be to try to establish, if it is even possible, what the difference is between Gray’s stage persona and his day-to-day persona. Gray tends to be very blunt and candid in his monologues, discussing everything from his mother’s suicide to his explorations into homosexuality. This begs the question: are there any stories that are too personal for him to tell? Unfortunately, this idea is somewhat inchoate and not very well explored, which makes the film somewhat unsatisfying.
I also felt that the film dragged a little bit and I was looking at my watch by the one-hour mark. This may be largely because the film was almost entirely non-stop interviews with or monologues by Spalding Gray: no family members, friends, or co-workers were interviewed to give different perspectives. Granted, Gray’s monologues are engaging so this approach is not wholly flawed. Nevertheless, I found that the more I heard Gray speak, the more interesting and damaged he seemed to be, the more sympathetic he was, and yet, simultaneously, the more he became unlikable. Gray had a difficult life, which may help to explain some of his hurtful and cruel actions towards the people he was most intimate with, such as cheating on his wife repeatedly. But the more details I discovered about Gray’s various indiscretions, the more repulsive I found him, the less interested I was in hearing his point of view on sex, love, and death: his favourite topics.
I should probably note that I am an extremely big Soderbergh fan. I have seen all of his films – with the exception of Gray’s Anatomy and the unwatchable Full Frontal – and Soderbergh is a really creative and innovative director and storyteller. It is, therefore, no surprise that And Everything is Going Fine looks like it has been made by a pro, even with the many VHS-quality scenes. The film is well-paced, well-cut, and thoughtfully put together. This is also Soderbergh’s first documentary. He knows how to tell a story but perhaps has not fully mastered this medium yet. Nevertheless, some of the best documentaries were made by filmmakers who did not start in documentary filmmaking (Sydney Pollack’s Sketches of Frank Gehry, Wehrner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World) because it takes a filmmaker to understand how to tell a story on film. Documentary filmmaking is more than just filming real people and real thing; telling a story and doing so with good cinematography is essential. Soderbergh’s And Everything is Going Fine is a flawed but good film that tells a good story and I look forward to future documentaries by Soderbergh.
