Director: Nick Broomfield
Year Released: 1992
Rating: 3.0
"Avant-garde actor" Spalding Gray does an amusing follow-up monologue to the successful Swimming to Cambodia, this time focusing on life-events that interfere with his attempt to complete a 2,000-plus page semi-autobiographical "novel." Director Broomfield gets a little more 'creative' visually than Jonathan Demme - and Laurie Anderson's music gets a little bit 'intrusive' - but it's still a man and a table and a glass of water, sharing stories (fact or fiction ... it doesn't matter) with his audience. It's especially illuminating now to hear exactly how obsessed with suicide Gray was (at one point in his monologue he mentions wanting to volunteer to work for a suicide hotline before being advised to get therapy himself) and how all these monologues (and novels) he wrote act as haunting harbingers of things to come for him. The friends and family of suicide victims often say "I never knew [the deceased] was depressed" but Gray really never made much of a mystery out of it: the theater is his shrink's office, his words are his confession.
