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The film follows Spalding Gray, who has an eye condition and is informed to take a surgery. Afraid of the dangers that surgery could bring, he decides to seek for a safer alternative treatment.
Using every cinematic trick in the book, [director] Soderbergh turns Gray's one-man world into the most surreal mind-expander since Alice fell down the rabbit hole.
At best, Gray is a tragicomic Everyman who strikes an empathic chord in his admiring audience; at worst, he's a middle-aged, self-absorbed, hopelessly provincial New Yorker -- an urban hick who won't shut up.
It is haunting, though. How could it not be, when the last lines of the monolog are "Ecstasy, despair, ecstasy, despair" and some mention of a big fish?
Not only is it interesting to follow the course of Gray's storyline, the movie is also equally interesting to view, even if the storyteller is just sitting in front of a desk most of the time.
The late Spalding Gray's monologue is typically fascinating, and Soderbergh's creative staging is a treat.
March 11, 2004
New York Times
A chatty, colorful, nicely sardonic account of how a crisis led Mr. Gray to assess his medical state, consider his mortality and take one more funny, self-dramatizing look at the eccentric world around him.