Whether we're talking about Laurie Anderson or William Inge, we all know that the live version of a play or performance piece is superior to the filmed clone. Conventional wisdom dictates that the "real thing" crackles with energy co-generated by performer and audience, while the celluloid simulacrum is at best no more than a fuzzy copy of the original. Walter Benjamin aside, why, then, is Spalding Gray's Swimming to Cambodia, the movie, so much more engaging than the performance?

For those who have seen neither, Swimming to Cambodia is a recounting/distillation of actor Spalding Gray's experiences in Thailand. Gray was there to play a small role in The Killing Fields, a film loosely based on journalist Sidney Schanberg's story of a beleaguered Cambodia tragically sucked into the Vietnam War. From that location, Gray's monologue takes off in all directions. With a minimum of bombast or boredom, and a maximal dose of witty self-deprecation and storytelling acumen, Gray tells it all: How he landed the job from director Roland Jaffe, the unfortunate history of American involvement in Cambodia, his quest--sometimes marijuana induced--for that single transcendental moment, and the state of his relationship with his girlfriend (and the film's producer), Renée Shafransky.

Gray calls himself a "poetic reporter" and it's an apt description of his literary and performing style. Economy is the key to both. Like a good journalist, Gray has an instinct for the telling detail and the illuminating analogy. Although describing himself as "not very political," he effectively communicates the savagery of Pol Pot's genocidal invasion of Phnom Penh by likening the Khmer Rouge to a force of rednecks "rallying in New Paltz, New York, 90 miles above the city, about to march in." If the poetry is lost in removing this remark from Gray's elegantly circuitous narrative context, I hope his ability to "bring home" the meaning of his material is not.

Part of the movie's success is clearly due to the editing of the material from more than two-and-a-half hours of live performance to 87 minutes of film. But it's not really a matter of the chaff being winnowed from the wheat, the clunkers from the sparkling one-liners. Director Jonathan Demme deserves much of the credit for his sensitivity to the intimacy and spontaneity of Gray's work. The result is a performance much more crisp and emotionally nuanced than the live act.

Demme, director extraordinaire of Stop Making Sense and more conventional films like Melvin and Howard, wisely chose to keep it simple. Demme opened up the film with just a few scenes from The Killing Fields, a slide or two of a sunset as background and an unobtrusive Laurie Anderson score. Swimming to Cambodia focuses almost exclusively on a seated Gray, notebook in hand, and a couple of pull-down maps. Despite Demme's use of three stationary cameras in continuous operation, cuts are few. Film's intrinsic characteristics--montage, camera movement, subjective point of view--are largely jettisoned. Gray's may be the most animated talking head in history.

This film cost $300,000 and that buys a lot of intimacy in today's Hollywood. But for a change that proved an advantage. Gray's recent success has led to gigs at Lincoln Center and the Mark Taper Forum, where the spontaneity and physical proximity of his performances in clubs and alternative spaces got sacrificed.