Review
The new Elizabeth Holmes film blends fact, fiction and fraud
Elizabeth Holmes with her child as Nathan Fielder looks on.
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You Can See Everything, the new documentary(-ish?) film about convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, is best treated as two movies stitched together. The first 90 minutes or so, filmed before she went to prison, are a relatively straightforward chronicle of filmmaker Nathan Fielder and his collaborator Lance Oppenheim documenting Holmes’ last month at home with her partner, Billy Evans, and their kids. The other 90 minutes are far more experimental, as the story picks up two years later without Holmes available to film. Fielder and Oppenheim have treated their approach to that part of the story as secret; I will not spoil it.
Substantively, the film makes a much better impression as a blend of reality and invention — and not only in the ways it announces itself to be — than it does as a true documentary. If you don’t expect to be able to square it with the widely reported facts about its subject, then You Can See Everything is compelling and fascinating, and it contains moments of real insight. (The best one, believe it or not, involves scrambled eggs.) Perhaps ironically, given its title, the best way to enjoy the film is not to look too closely.
That’s going to be tough for people who, like me, are Theranos completists. There is a tremendous amount of reporting and investigating that has been done about Theranos, and about Elizabeth Holmes specifically. Still, Fielder, who develops a close bond with Holmes over the course of the film, seemingly chooses to trust his gut and his own conversations with her over all else, and he develops a sort of chin-stroking inability to decide what to think about what she did. He also has an understandable suspicion that she might be trying to play him, at least early on. This is familiar territory for people who encounter her: Even in Alex Gibney’s excellent 2019 documentary The Inventor, the question of Holmes’ intent vexes some people. Did she convince herself that a sort of “fake it till you make it” approach wasn’t exactly lying? Was she so able to fool other people that she fooled herself as well?
You Can See Everythingpresents some of these same questions, but it stacks the deck in answering them by setting aside some of the evidence that would seem, at the very least, to shed some light. For instance, when Holmes tells Fielder she never lies — never has lied in her life — he is skeptical, but he responds by asking her about things like white lies. Surely, she has told a white lie now and then? Gotten out of a social obligation by pretending to be sick? No? She seems open to the possibility she might have, in those very limited situations, but certainly never, ever about anything of any significance.
As he works through what to make of this claim on her part, Fielder wonders whether she might, in fact, not have lied to her investors as such. For instance, he wonders if a misunderstanding over the word “can” might exonerate her, and whether the rah-rah statements she made about the capabilities of her technology were therefore not intentionally false. Maybe, he wonders, she was just using the word “can” one way and her investors heard it a different way. Maybe it’s because, as Billy says, she thinks differently. (I should be clear here that these are things that “Nathan Fielder” the on-screen character wonders. Whether the filmmaker Nathan Fielder, inside his own mind, actually wonders about these things is impossible to know, as is the distance between those two Fielders.)
The problem with spending so much time on this narrow question of what “can” means is that this is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the only thing, or the only kind of thing, that Elizabeth Holmes was accused of lying about. For example, at her trial, Holmes was accused of falsely claiming that her technology was being used by the military on the battlefield, a statement that doesn’t lend itself nearly so easily to a linguistic “it depends on your definition of ‘can'”-type analysis. But at least in the final cut, Fielder doesn’t ask about these other, more concrete untruths and how they might complicate her wide-eyed insistence that she never lies on purpose.
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Similarly, when poring over whether Holmes has any malicious intent or is just misunderstood because she’s overly literal (and, the film strongly implies but does not quite say, neurodivergent), he never asks her about the whistleblowers who said she tried to ruin their lives with threats, lawyers and private investigators. That, if true, would lend some credence to the idea that she knew she had plenty to hide, rather than having innocently given investors the wrong idea. That consciousness of guilt seems to be precisely the matter at hand. Why not ask her about it?
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This selective attention and inattention extends even to what happens between the subjects and the filmmakers. Fielder becomes fixated at one point, as communication with Evans breaks down, on the terms of the agreement between the couple and A24 — and whether they would profit from the film. Fielder wonders what Holmes knows of the financial negotiation, and what Evans may (or may not) have shared with her. But … presumably, Fielder has access to whatever paperwork they signed, since it’s his movie. The obvious question is: What, if anything, did Holmes sign, and what did it say? There are suggestions she might not have needed to sign anything at all, but it feels murkier than it should. When Fielder the on-screen character doesn’t reckon with evidence that it seems like Fielder the filmmaker should have — and doesn’t explain why not — the uncomfortable sense that there’s some willful sleight-of-hand going on creeps in. (And again, some varieties of sleight-of-hand with reenactments and such are well within Fielder’s usual box of tricks; this is different, particularly if he’s not transparent about whether he’s doing it.)
Fielder aficionados, of whom there are many, will tell you enthusiastically that this bafflement is the point of his methods and of his style. He wants you to find it all very trippy, to question what’s real and what’s not. He wants you to wonder what to think, including about him. That’s true, and he’s very good at it, and it works exceptionally well when the ambiguity originates in the messy nature of a real situation and in the strange nature of human behavior, as it does in the film’s treatment of some of the underlying dynamics of Holmes and Evans’ relationship. It feels a bit more hollow and more manipulative if questions are artificially rendered unanswerable through the setting aside of available evidence.
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If you treat You Can See Everything as a kind of fact-fiction blend, which it more glaringly becomes in its second half, it is an enormously skilled piece of filmmaking that pulls on precisely the threads it means to. It creates a grayer-than-gray version of Elizabeth Holmes who credibly might, in fact, mostly be a victim of a lot of misunderstandings and some bad relationship choices. Seeing Fielder wrestle with that possibility — particularly as someone who touched, during the second season of The Rehearsal,on his own ambivalence about potentially being diagnosed as neurodivergent — is genuinely gripping. It’s even touching, maybe.
But if you read John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood, and if you listen to the accompanying podcast, and if you watch The Inventor, and if you read about what unfolded at her fraud trial, it’s fair to wonder whether You Can See Everything‘s version of Elizabeth Holmes is, at its heart, a creation of the filmmakers that could do a disservice to people who treat it as real, as well as to the people who suffered real consequences from her actions. Not just the Theranos investors, but regular people who said they got incorrect test results from Theranos machines, and those whistleblowers, and other people who worked for her and were sucked into her orbit.
Fielder and Oppenheim’s “Liz” is assembled at least in part through the clever use of narrative negative space — through leaving in what supports this “it’s complicated, who knows?” version of her and leaving out whatever suggests that in reality, that might be a lot of hooey, and she might not be all that different from anybody else who commits a large-scale fraud. That a leader did not initially set out to rip anybody off doesn’t mean there was no dishonesty. Even the co-creator of the Fyre Festival, who was also convicted of fraud, may have hoped it would be a big success when the planning started. He, too, was probably sad about going to prison.
“It’s not that deep” is not much of a three-hour documentary logline, and it wouldn’t make a movie nearly as interesting as this one. But what if that, in fact, is the truth?
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- Elizabeth Holmes
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