`GRAY'S ANATOMY' AN EYE-OPENING LOOK AT ECCENTRICITY.

Byline: Janet Maslin New York Times

As Spalding Gray brings improbable merriment to describing his ocular troubles in ``Gray's Anatomy,'' he mentions one doctor who called him Gary Spalding.

On the other hand, the surgeon to whom Gray ultimately turned, after following all the wild detours he could pack into this monologue on health and frailty, made a videocassette of the operation for his celebrity patient and called it ``Swimming to Macula Pucker.'' Practically everyone who encounters Gray these days must know that his private-sounding experiences are grist for the monologue mill.

Still, Gray successfully continues to mine his life for madly spiraling tales of woe. This time he tells how his pucker was diagnosed (``think of your retina as a piece of Saran Wrap, bunching''), how it prompted crackpot speculation (too many burritos in his diet? Too much vanadium?) and how it sent him into a panicky search for help. Along the way, he found enough storytelling material to sustain a 14th monologue almost as if it were his first.

The specificity and relatively narrow range of its subject matter mean ``Gray's Anatomy'' is no ``Swimming to Cambodia'' in terms of mercurial energy or scope. But this lesser work is still a chatty, colorful, nicely sardonic account of how this crisis led Gray to assess his medical state, consider his mortality and take one more funny, self-dramatizing look at the eccentric world around him.

Clutching at straws, he considers possible reasons for his predicament. (``Well, what is it you don't want to SEE?'' he says his new-age friends asked.) He wonders if eye trouble is a consequence of Oedipal obsession. And he seeks enlightenment in such places as an American Indian sweat lodge, where one pilgrim asks the Great Spirit to cure a craving for caffeine, and at a doctor's office decorated with ski medals and a 6-foot-tall cutout of Hoagy Carmichael.

``All this stuff really makes you want to see, Gray, doesn't it?'' the doctor inquires. Gray makes his listeners grasp the urgency behind that not very thoughtful question.

The importance of sight is significant not only to the star's monologue but also to the film's lily-gilding direction. Steven Soderbergh, who previously cast Gray in a dramatic role in ``King of the Hill,'' now brings an incongruously busy visual style to this simple material.

As Jonathan Demme showed in ``Swimming to Cambodia,'' Gray can easily fill up a movie screen using nothing more than a table, a chair and the power of his quirky imagination. But Soderbergh, who is himself no stranger to quirks, also supplies shifting backdrops, sound effects, colored lights, smoke and even clowning, pantomiming silhouettes to surround Gray.

This direction is more ambitious than apt, since it calls attention to the artifice that Gray otherwise conceals so well. Cuts and scene changes become distractingly blunt, as do the star's efforts to suggest spontaneous enthusiasm. And, as a form of commentary on the monologue itself, Soderbergh's emphasis on all things visual is so self-evident that it adds little. A handsomely photographed 10-minute prologue (in an 80-minute film) featuring other speakers with eye problems feels more like padding than illumination.

``Gray's Anatomy'' leaves Gray in relative peace, embracing ``the perfect yin and yang existence'' that lies at the end of his quest. Before arriving at such ostensible tranquillity, he has - and describes - his share of mordant amusement along the way.

THE FACTS

The film: ``Gray's Anatomy'' (not rated).

The stars: Spalding Gray.

Behind the scenes: Directed by Steven Soderbergh. Written by Spalding Gray, based on the monologue by Gray and Renee Shafransky. Produced by John Hardy. Released by Northern Arts Entertainment.

Running time: One hour, 20 minutes.

Playing: Monica 4-Plex.

Our rating: Three Stars.