'Gray's Anatomy': One for the Ears

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who tell stories and those who are dead.

Of the former, perhaps the foremost example is Spalding Gray, who has almost single-handedly revivified the magic of the spoken tale in an age far too consumed with sound bites. Gray is, admittedly, an acquired taste: He talks too much, even for a storyteller.

In "Gray's Anatomy," the latest film version of one of his performances, he works a kind of macabre line. It's the story of an ordeal by pucker.

No, not the kind of pucker that leaves lipstick stains on the collar.

The pucker in question is of the macula variety, when the tissue at the rear of an eye bunches up, causing blurriness. Gray takes his own ghastly experiences with the condition, not at all to be laughed at, and transmutes them from the squalor and banality of the reality they were into the gossamer spell of narrative. He's so self-deprecating that the story ultimately becomes something almost miraculously paradoxical: a tale told by an idiot -- but really nicely.

Even though this is ultimately a trip to wellville, for Gray getting there isn't just the fun, it's the point. Thus his narrative goes sideways as often as it goes forward. He's of the modernist, digressive school, less into speed than charm, and can't resist the impulse to explore an odd area, an out-of-the-way thought.

His narration re-creates the high panic a man flirting with blindness will necessarily feel, and his attempts to remain sighted have a breathless, clammy horror to them. He'll try anything, including a nude foray into a Native American sweat lodge where he cannot help feeling guilty for his race's elimination of the very ancient Sioux god he is praying to. He wonders if maybe the Great Spirit didn't send the pucker as a way of getting back at him for Wounded Knee. Meanwhile, the guy next to him is having a heart attack.

Then there's the Philippine "psychic surgeon," a necklace-laden Elvis wannabe who pulls bloody organs from the quivering breasts of the believers. When he gropes with fat, rosy-tinted digits toward the Gray orbit bone, color Spal gone, screaming in panic. Meanwhile, an Asian doctor is telling him there is a slight chance of blindness if he operates -- but only a slight one. And if he does go blind, hey, big deal. There's always prosthesis.

With his slightly debauched face -- plummy-complexioned, baggy, faintly disreputable -- Gray sits there and talks. That is the movie's best thing: Gray, the mesmerizer, the tribal witch doctor, the shaman, reaching beyond the technology of film, camera, projector and screen, and spinning ancient incantations.

His face slightly ashine with storyteller's sweat, his thinning hair pushed back, his speckled hands dancing madly, his voice modulating through personalities, he chronicles the ordeal with aching humanity and utterly without the imposition of ego. He's so damned flawed he makes you feel like a god yourself.

Alas, the director of this enterprise isn't Jonathan Demme, who so masterfully captured Gray in another adventure ("Swimming to Cambodia") but the younger and showier Steven Soderbergh, of "sex, lies and videotape."

Soderbergh -- or should that be "soderbergh"? -- is faced with a challenge that has ruined many better men. Only Demme and the genre's master, Louis Malle (in "My Dinner With Andre" and the even more masterful "Vanya on 42nd Street") managed to prompt basically one-dimensional, performance-driven material to transcend its limits and come alive visually as well as verbally.

Soderbergh certainly works hard enough: When he can't get Gray to move, he moves the camera; he moves the background; he moves the lights. Give him a place to stand and he'd move the world. There's a whole lot going on in the frame beyond Gray's monologue, most of it distracting. The piece is clearly over-conceived as film as distinct from its original identity on the stage. But rather than magnifying the power of Gray's performance, it flirts with negating it.

In the end, Gray's gift for narrative wins out over Soderbergh's showy turns -- the storyteller defeats the technician -- but it's much closer than it should be.

Gray's Anatomy is not rated and contains no scenes of a graphic nature.