No matter what you think about Elizabeth Holmes, go see this film
The documentary that follows the Theranos founder and convicted fraudster has finally arrived in Australia. It will exceed your expectations.
You Can See Everything ★★★★★
Directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim
Starring Elizabeth Holmes, Billy Evans, Fielder.
USA, M, 174 min
You Can See Everything, the new documentary following Theranos co-founder and convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, is a delicious final deception in a wonderful year of cinema.
If you want to be part of the cultural conversation – or need to see what America has been talking about for the past month – you must see it, quickly. It’s a rare cultural phenomenon that has critics crawling over each other to top each other’s hyperbole – and spoil crucial details.
Elizabeth Holmes has been an enigmatic figure for a long time. YouTube
This film will exceed your expectations, no matter how much or little you care for Holmes. It is an endlessly captivating curio, but it is not the messiah. It’s a very naughty movie saying less about the subject than it does about the filmmakers, the documentary form, and the nature of truth.
Not that truth needs complicating these days.
On the face of it, the film’s subject, the tech poster girl, is compelling – a person of rare confidence, a fabulist and a trickster. She’s very much a paragon of her Silicon Valley era, who had a net worth of more than $US4 billion by age 30 and was heading to jail before 40, yet she remains indefatigable, noting “All I know is my truth ...”. She is entrancing in action.
The documentary’s style is also a minor mind-bender. It shifts form and tone in ways that amuse, surprise and baffle, but it always remains in some sort of control, capturing and leading the viewer while not wholly answering the multitude of questions.
That controlled imbalance is a talent of the hard-to-classify Nathan Fielder, co-director with Lance Oppenheim. Fielder’s position in contemporary culture has largely been off to the side, despite his previous TV series being broadcast on the high-profile HBO network.
He’s much admired by those, including me, who stumbled across his nebbish yet manipulative comic persona that blurred the boundaries of reality and performance in the faux reality series Nathan For You and The Rehearsal, the second series of which is a mad masterpiece.
He isn’t a mainstream star, partly because, off screen, he doesn’t play the role of celebrity, with clumsy interviews and deflections, most notably in a recent Wired cover story; and partly because his brand of awkward has more of a British comic sensibility.
Until now, his anonymity has allowed him to run wild in plain sight. That’s what allowed him and Oppenheim, who also has the drama Primetimecurrently in release, access to a macabre going-away party.
Holmes invited the co-directors into the home she shares with partner Billy Evans and their two young children, 34 days before she began her 13-year prison sentence for fraud, seemingly without doing her due diligence on the filmmakers (that wasn’t really a thing for her investors either, including the Walton family and Rupert Murdoch).
Fielder inserts himself in their lives while Oppenheim provides no slack, shooting in unstinting close-up. And 34 days becomes three years as, like any winning documentary, the story takes crazy turns that couldn’t be scripted.
Fielder’s style is a performative cinema verite. It’s not particularly new because the observational documentary form has already strayed so far from the quaint, passive style of Frederick Wiseman or DA Pennebaker.
Now the documentarian is observer, participant, agitator, advocate, therapist, star, or eater of McDonald’s exclusively for 30 days. Fielder is all but the latter, an unnerving presence in Holmes’ beachfront rental, content to let silences run and subjects fill the space.
Holmes gives as good as she gets. Her complicated personality is one thing – is she merely PT Barnum or a cold-faced killer? – but then there’s her excruciating partner. She just wants to be believed; Billy has a heightened need for control.
Fielder’s intrigue in both characters is compelling and sucks you in until he vacillates and hints at empathy, open to the robotic Holmes having a peculiar kind of humanity. Or not.
He’s so deft knowing when and how to shift the form and the story, while his frequent editor Adam Locke-Norton maintains a thrilling momentum. And Oppenheim provides a cinematic feel to what might have been claustrophobic. I can’t recall a three-hour film that has gripped me like this.
But I have questions. Many questions. Is it journalism? No. Nothing is tested, or verified – it’s all merely allowed to hang. The film’s title is an unresolved statement. Does it get to the bottom of Holmes’ mad personality? No. Arguably, it merely confuses any hard preconceptions. This documentary is more about the documentarians themselves; the compromises they make, the way their intrusion shapes behaviour, and the tricks they pull to entertain.
Then there’s a facile commercial question: will this be the first documentary to be nominated for the Academy Awards’ best picture? Surely.
But the real question is: why would you spend time with, or give two hoots about, this woman? She’s a convicted fraudster who’s been subject of a comprehensive book (Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup), documentary (The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley) and an OK TV dramatisation (The Dropout).
But that’s the joy of this absorbing, inventive film. If the subject doesn’t get you, the storytelling will. And I have many more questions. Let’s discuss in the foyer.
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