Gray's Anatomy
First screened in December 2001 / Most recently screened and reviewed in August 2024
Director: Steven Soderbergh. Cast: Spalding Gray. Monologue about Gray's experience with a rare eye disorder. Screenplay: Spalding Gray and Renée Shafransky.
Could you simply listen to this film of one of Spalding Gray's famous monologues as if it were a radio performance or a podcast? Sure! Does that make it ideal viewing while slow-cooking a five-hour Bolognese sauce, on which you occasionally have to steal a glance? Yes! The whole 80-minute story is about Gray almost losing his sight in one eye, and consulting everyone from a Manhattan "macular scraper" to a Filipino "psychic surgeon" to try to undo his retinal pucker. I.e., even by the standards of solo oration by a man mostly seated in a chair, this one might especially discourage any visual component.
But that rascal Steven Soderbergh, in the epicenter (or eye??) of his mid-90s, Schizopolis-y reinvention period, of course had to go the other way. Gray's Anatomy was by far Soderbergh's most colorful movie up to that point in his career, give or take The Underneath, which sure didn't get a lot of takers.
The chromatic blossoming that would announce itself a couple years later in Out of Sight (hey, a good name for this movie, too!) and would only get more luscious from there is already gestating here, where many directors might have opted for ghostly black-and-white medical imaging, or waiting-room taupe. While Gray sits, fixing the audience often with his wry but hawklike stare amid a mid-speed roller coaster of medical and medical-adjacent events, Soderbergh and cinematographer Elliot Davis fill the screen with colors that men typically don't learn without going to Gay School: not red but carnelian, not green but electric jade, not white but livid eyeball white, not blue but Ocean's Lapis, in which you expect a few dolphins are hiding. No Soderbergh movie this side of Ocean's Thirteen doubles down this hard on color as both an abstraction and a material object all its own, and it's the least likely of his movies to have gone that way. (A notable peak for Elliot Davis, too, who parted ways with Soderbergh after Out of Sight following five close years and never found another director to push him so creatively; he's spent much of the 21st century filming teenage angst in downcast palettes and obligatory shaky-cams, pausing to make Meryl Streep's Margaret Thatcher look even more like Japanese theater than it would have already.)
The sheer vividness of hue is kind of an end in itself in Gray's Anatomy and doesn't always entail incredible framing or useful visual information. But it's also not just a gimmick or consolation prize, trying to make delectable the image of a stationary man, talking. Soderbergh always asks a question in his films, and I think in this one it might be, "Can I dramatize the fear of losing sight not by miming a nascent darkness but by honoring the extremity of what would be lost?" or "What if there were an 80-minute My Dinner a with Andre two-hander, not between two people but between colorful storytelling and colorful stage-lighting?" You never stop thinking This movie's a little overlit for what it is, but that's what makes it seem like a provocation, not just a coincidence or an apologetic attempt to make Gray's Anatomy worth the price of a ticket.
I was tempted to say that despite all this visual strategizing, your enjoyment of Gray's Anatomy will almost certainly hinge regardless on how engrossed you are in Gray's increasingly loopy yarn. That still feels like a sensible postulation, but then there's the weird evidence of life as lived, where one day your eye works and the next it doesn't, or the same movie watched twice isn't at all the same movie. I first saw Gray's Anatomy as broadcast via the Independent Film Channel on the 12-inch TV with built-in VCR that was all I had for home viewing my last year in college and for the first half of grad school. I thought it was tiresome, unworthy of its 80 minutes, and a strange fit for this medium. It was also December 2001, and I yearned for Ocean's Eleven to be my forever boyfriend and Erin Brockovich my cool-as-shit older sister on speed-dial, and I newly wanted to love every Soderbergh movie I'd ever seen. Gray's Anatomy may not have been a curveball I was ready or willing to swing at. Now I understand so much better what Soderbergh's deal is, even when it yields a film I hate or a question I'm not positive was worth asking. (What if Claire Foy, but canted, with bug-eye lenses?)
Is 20+ years of sympathy and acquaintance with Soderbergh the reason I liked Gray's Anatomy so much this time? Was I paying better attention to the story? Was it the frankly intoxicating fragrance of the Bolognese? Or is it seeing the "same" film on a digital broadcast almost six times clearer than the snowy cable bandwidths of upstate New York in early winter, conveying all that color and light that formerly struck me as arbitrary affectations? Life is full of mysteries—not just the huge ones that will preoccupy you forever, but weird little riddles like this that add some flavor to a quiet night.
P.S. The Regular Folk talking heads who open the movie and then recur every 15 minutes or so? Love 'em. Grade:B
