Spalding Gray’s ‘Swimming to Cambodia’ is again on the Brattle 40 years later

The loos on the Brattle Theatre are wallpapered with previous calendars, packages and commercials for occasions from all through the cinema’s storied historical past. In the boys’s room — or extra precisely, the “sitting and standing” room, versus “sitting only” subsequent door — above the urinal is a flyer welcoming monologist Spalding Gray for a sequence of reside performances. After first showing on the Brattle in 1984 as a part of a profit for the late, lamented Boston Film and Video Foundation, Gray returned for a five-week residency in October and November of 1985, throughout which he carried out his masterpiece “Swimming to Cambodia” for the primary time in New England. On the advert for the occasion adorning the Brattle’s toilet wall, a patron scrawled the initials “JMC” and “I was there.” Lucky JMC.

Forty years later, “Swimming to Cambodia” is coming again to the Brattle. Long out of print on DVD and unavailable to stream, director Jonathan Demme’s 1987 movie of Gray’s monologue has been remastered from the unique digicam adverse for a characteristically wonderful new Blu-ray from Vinegar Syndrome’s Cinématographe label, full of particular options and knowledgeable appreciations from critics Scout Tafoya, Keith Uhlich and Demme biographer David M. Stewart. Local movie professor Stewart, whose “There’s No Going Back: The Life and Work of Jonathan Demme” hit bookstores final month, might be conducting a dialogue with Cinématographe curator Justin LaLiberty following the Brattle’s premiere of the 2K remaster on Saturday, Aug. 16.

I first noticed Demme’s movie of “Swimming to Cambodia” someday within the early Nineteen Nineties, due to a late night time PBS broadcast. Watching it on the little black-and-white TV in my childhood bed room after my dad and mom thought I had gone to sleep, I discovered myself riveted and up buzzing half the night time after it was over. This was surprising, as I’d initially tuned in as a result of it gave the impression of one thing that might be nice to go to sleep to. The complete film is a person sitting at a small picket desk with a spiral pocket book and a glass of water, speaking quick and telling tales about his experiences as a bit participant in Roland Joffe’s 1984 movie “The Killing Fields.”

But there’s no nodding off as soon as Spalding Gray begins talking. Riffing with a feverish depth, interrupting himself with wry, conversational asides and exactly timed manic outbursts, Gray’s incantatory repetitions of key phrases and callbacks are virtually musical of their syncopations. His descriptions are so vivid, you may later end up remembering issues he recounts within the movie as in the event you noticed them with your individual eyes. It’s the “My Dinner with Andre” theater of the thoughts impact, or that previous Alistair Cooke line about preferring radio over tv as a result of the images are higher.

Gray comes off as an endearing basket case, so neurotic he ceaselessly whips himself right into a tizzy and, at one level within the film, can’t enable himself to go away his SoHo loft house with out turning the radio off on a constructive phrase. (As an NPR listener, he jokes that typically he’d be ready for one all morning.) He was a veteran of the downtown New York experimental theatre scene and one of many co-founders of The Wooster Group alongside Willem Dafoe. Gray made a reputation for himself within the early Eighties with acutely detailed, amusingly self-deprecating one-man exhibits like “Terrors of Pleasure,” concerning the traumas of renovating a trip home, and “Sex and Death to the Age 14,” which is about precisely what it says it’s.

Turning navel gazing into efficiency artwork, Gray obsessively recounted the trivia of his life as a means of imposing order on an existence he discovered overwhelmingly chaotic. Telling tales is how we clarify our lives to ourselves, however “Swimming to Cambodia” is about what occurs when a seasoned storyteller comes up in opposition to the unexplainable. “The Killing Fields” chronicles the harrowing true story of New York Times reporters Sydney Schanberg and Dith Pran, who investigated the U.S. unlawful bombings of Cambodia through the Vietnam War, after which the nation fell to the Khmer Rouge militia and a genocide that killed greater than two million folks in a few of the most savage and barbaric methods conceivable. As Gray despairs in his monologue, “Who needs metaphors and poetry for hell? This is here. It happened.”

“Swimming to Cambodia” traces the actor’s awakening amid the surreal absurdity of a big-budget film shoot, filled with goofy get together tales and sidelines to Bangkok brothels. It’s a solipsist’s journey to understanding the unfathomable. So a lot of Gray’s comedy comes from fancying himself a freewheeling philosopher-poet, whereas his makes an attempt at being a libertine are inevitably sabotaged by his neurotic hangups and WASP-y New England repression. (The Barrington, Rhode Island native’s Brahmin accent is so thick it took me years to comprehend his frequent references to a Los Angeles arts venue known as the “Machtay Perform” were actually the Mark Taper Forum.) His is the plight of a day player realizing how small his part is in the larger story, an actor unable to remember his lines in the shadow of a tragedy beyond words.

Paring the four-hour, two-evening, one-man show down to a brisk 87 minutes, Demme shoots Gray the same way he filmed the Talking Heads in “Stop Making Sense.” He keeps the cameras confined to the stage and riding the rhythms of the performance, punctuated by dramatic though not overbearing lighting flourishes from the legendary cinematographer John Bailey, while Laurie Anderson’s music bleats and burbles in time with Gray’s patter. Most importantly, Demme leaves out the crowd shots other concert films rely upon to tell us how to react. By excluding the audience, “Swimming to Cambodia” doesn’t feel like merely a record of a theatrical performance. It stays in the present tense — something happening in front of us right now, instead of something other people saw back then. It’s notable how in his later Hollywood films like “The Silence of the Lambs” and “Philadelphia,” Demme’s signature shot became characters looking and speaking directly into the camera lens. Here’s an entire movie of Spalding Gray doing just that.

I was lucky enough to see Gray perform four times, and once embarrassed myself by annoying him on the street for an autograph when I was stumbling home from a Greenwich Village bar and he was trying to catch a cab after the premiere of a Wim Wenders movie at Webster Hall. A considerably prouder occasion was the day I completed the last of my college classes and treated myself to a ticket to see Gray rehearsing that night at New York’s fabled P.S. 122, an abandoned public school building turned performance space where he’d sometimes test out new material in front of a crowd. The monologue “Morning, Noon and Night” would turn out to be his last, a heartfelt account of the late-life domestic bliss Gray discovered after having children and moving to the Sag Harbor suburbs in his mid-50s. He even stepped out from behind that trademark wooden table and danced a little bit at the end.

The last time I saw him was during a return to Cambridge in January 2002, performing not at the Brattle this time, but at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre. He had taken “Swimming to Cambodia” back out on the road as a response to 9/11, tweaking a few lines here and there to try and meet a horrible historical moment none of us had quite figured out how to process yet during that numbed, grief-stricken winter. Gray seemed miserable. He was walking with crutches and visibly in pain throughout the show. Celebrating his 60th birthday in Ireland the previous summer, a gruesome car accident had fractured his skull and hip, leaving him with a torn sciatic nerve and titanium plates in his head. His friend Oliver Sacks would later write devastatingly about the brain damage and depression the performer suffered as a result of his injuries. After several suicide attempts, Spalding Gray went missing in January 2004. His body was found two months later in the East River.

I couldn’t bring myself to revisit his work for years after that. It was too sad. His sometime collaborator Steven Soderbergh’s 2010 “And Everything is Going Fine” is a brilliantly edited collage film distilling countless hours of Gray’s monologues and television interviews into a stream-of-consciousness semi-autobiography. It’s a worthy tribute in which the subject gets to do all the talking, because nobody talked better than Spalding Gray. In recent years, I’ve started watching my old “Swimming to Cambodia” disc again. Whenever current events get too insane and overwhelming, I take solace in the film and Gray’s quixotic search for beauty and the sublime in a world where unspeakable horrors and atrocities happen every day. As you might imagine, it’s been in pretty heavy rotation lately.

“Swimming to Cambodia” screens on the Brattle Theatre on Sunday, Aug. 16, and is on the market on Blu-ray from Cinématographe.