MOVIE REVIEW : Another Talkfest From Spalding Gray

To call Spalding Gray’s autobiographical monologues self-indulgent is to underscore the obvious. A better question would be: Is Gray worth indulging?

In “Monster in a Box,” Gray presents us with his first filmed monologue since his celebrated 1987 “Swimming to Cambodia.” Like that film, “Monster” (at the Hillcrest Cinemas) takes place on a spotlighted stage with a table and a chair and not much else. Director Nick Broomfield understands how to keep a monologue visually interesting--no small feat. He modulates the jabber with cuts and camera angles keyed to the shifts in Gray’s charged verbiage.

The results are involving without being particularly probing; Gray’s stand-up performance never really deepens, perhaps because his persona doesn’t. He’s transfixed by his own limpid nuttiness, and his gift for self-enclosure sometimes keeps us at a distance. He often seems furthest from us when his close-ups fill the screen.

Gray typically works his monologues out over a long trial run; before opening it at Lincoln Center in November, 1990, he tried out “Monster in a Box” in Scotland and Israel and various cities in America, including a run at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. What this means is that the monologue, which is performed as if it were a semi-improvisatory riff, is actually scripted right down to the pauses. Gray doesn’t need to work off the audience because his own responses are already built-in. It’s this wiggy, wind-up toy quality, this sense that Gray is dithering away without really connecting with his studio audience, that makes his talkfests kind of spooky.

“Monster in a Box” (rated PG-13) doesn’t have the knockabout lyricism or the velocity of “Swimming to Cambodia.” It’s more discursive, a patchwork of oddments that doesn’t really add up. (The not-adding-up is part of its raggedy charm.) The “monster” in the title is a 1,900-page novel called “Impossible Vacation” that Gray claims to have finally completed after years of avoidance. (Its bulk rests imposingly on the table.) But the monster is also Gray himself, poking through the metaphorical box that makes up his own world.

Sometimes his world is a bit too much like the world on any given night at a local comedy club. When he describes his sojourn in Los Angeles, he peppers his jags with standard-issue stuff about earthquakes, about how nobody walks in Los Angeles, about how “health is the new drug” and so on. We don’t go to a Spalding Gray monologue to hear that “there’s no there there,” and the fact that he lets us know he’s reinforcing cliches doesn’t save the material.

He’s better when he talks about his “idea lunches” with various producer types, or his meeting with agents from the Creative Artists Agency. (“We hope you’re not one of these artists who’s afraid of making money,” they counsel him.) This material should be overly familiar too, except that Gray’s Hollywood observations are so wickedly specific that they could form a companion piece to “The Player.” Gray seems to be observing the Hollywood mores with an anthropologist’s eye, but he’s just star-struck enough that he’s really wowed by all the attention. He’s beyond cynicism: These folks are unbelievable to him.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the trouble they get him into, Gray is inexorably drawn to all manner of unbelievable types (at least for the purposes of his art). Like them, he finds sanity a bit discomfiting. In the course of “Monster in a Box,” we hear about his interviews with people who claim to have been abducted by UFOs, his experiences on a fact-finding tour of Nicaragua (where some in his group suspected he might be working for the CIA), his disastrous appearance at an American film festival in Moscow (where Russian audiences for “Swimming to Cambodia” were subjected to a gibberish of simultaneous translation) and his stint playing the Narrator in an Off-Broadway production of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.” (He made the mistake of reading his reviews, mostly pans, on opening night.)

Does all of this have to mean anything? The picaresque, mostly autobiographical plot for “Impossible Vacation” keeps fading in and out of the monologue--it has something to do with a Puritan New England boy growing up in the ‘60s who slowly learns to extricate himself from his mother who killed herself, and whose funeral he missed. The novel is actually a box within a box. In the end, its completion may have provided a sense of closure for Gray that it doesn’t for us. The same could be said for “Monster in a Box.” You make up your own connections as you go along.

‘Monster in a Box’

Spalding Gray as himself.

A Fine Line Features presentation in association with Channel Four. Director Nick Broomfield. Producer Jon Blair. Written by Spalding Gray. Cinematographer Michael Coulter. Editor Graham Hutchings. Music Laurie Anderson. Production design Ray Oxley. Running time: 1 hour, 47 minutes.

MPAA-rated PG-13.