10/03/97
MOVIE REVIEW: Gray's Anatomy
Spalding Gray's eye for the absurd

By MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal-Bulletin Arts Writer

*** (out of five)
Starring Spalding Gray. Written by Gray, directed by Steven Soderbergh. Not rated, contains adult themes. Running time: 86 minutes.

Spalding Gray, who grew up in Barrington, has made a career of talking about the nutty things that go on in his life.

Gray's Anatomy is no exception. It's about his mid-life crisis, when he discovered that his left eye was deteriorating and heard the unsettling news from a retina expert that he had a "macula pucker."

Gray takes us from his initial horror at learning of this condition to hearing about the icky-sounding surgery needed to cure it -- something called macula scraping -- to his long search to be among the lucky 1 percent who could avoid surgery through other means.

These included a return to his Christian Science roots, help from a psychiatrist, taking part in an Indian sweat ceremony in Minnesota and visiting a psychic surgeon in the Philippines. The surgeon is described by Gray as "the Elvis Presley of psychic surgery," complete with Prince Valiant haircut, gold neck chains, white-lattice leisure shoes and "this kind of Ricky Ricardo `Babalu'-Vegas energy pouring out of him."

Opening the film and intercut throughout it in black-and-white interviews are people who have had awful things happen to their eyes, including a woman who accidentally glued her eyelids shut with Super Glue and a man who put his eye back in his head after it got knocked out.

The setup and the first part of the film are hilarious as Gray embellishes with excruciating detail the terrors of his eye exam, including a specialist who insisted on calling him Gary Spalding. That leads to his funny flight to find a way out of the situation, including attempts to reconnect with his long-cut Christian Science roots only to have an exasperated practitioner he'd called for help long-distance hanging up on him.

But the longer it goes on, the more absurd Gray's Anatomy becomes and the less involving it is, as Gray sweats it out with the Great Spirit in the Indian sweat lodge or is presented with 754 questions about the food he may have eaten in the past six months during an expensive visit to a wacky doctor in Nutley, N.J. It all seems so wildly embellished that it becomes more fantasy than storytelling you can relate to, which is the magic of the first part of the film.

Gray's Anatomy was directed by Steven Soderbergh (sex, lies and videotape), who opens it up cleverly from the usual Gray monologue of just having him sit behind a desk.

The camera swoops around him. Backgrounds change from eye charts to a blue sky with fleecy clouds to a teepee-like structure to represent the sweat lodge. And there are those amusing interviews with real people, who are as funny as anything else in the film.