Grays Anatomy (1996)

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.

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.

There's something intrinsically insincere about the whole quest. Gray is on a search less for a cure than for material.

Gray's Anatomy finds Spalding Gray turning a bout with a bizarre ocular condition into a dizzying, absorbing odyssey of the neurotic mind.

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?

Soderbergh does (Gray) no favors with a series of overwrought stylistic choices.

Visually inventive version of Gray's monologue, though the material is not as interesting as that of Swimming to Cambodia.

The late Spalding Gray's monologue is typically fascinating, and Soderbergh's creative staging is a treat.

Gray's Anatomy is a triumphant reminder of the power of words to summon our deepest fears.

The film manages to come off like a dinnertime conversation with a friend -- albeit a one-sided and long but very good and very funny one.

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.

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.