“Isn’t it weird that I made a TV show about some kind of business scam and you got in trouble for…a business scam?” » comedian and filmmaker Nathan Fielder kindly asks Elizabeth Holmes.
A month before the famous Theranos CEO turns himself in to begin his 11-year prison sentence for criminal fraud in 2023, Holmes and her husband contacted A24 in a last-ditch effort to exonerate him in the public eye, suggesting they send a film crew to document his final days of freedom. Alongside director Lance Oppenheim, Fielder – a gritty comedy mastermind whose work often straddles the line between fact and fiction – has embraced the impossible project of discovering who the infamous Stanford dropout really is.
“I never really made that connection,” Holmes says. “I think it’s quite a different situation.”
No one is better prepared than Fielder to plumb the depths of Holmes’ psyche. His satirical reality TV show “Nathan for You” catapulted him to cult stardom as he took on the role of an exaggerated, deadpan version of himself who tries to help struggling small businesses by performing stupid interventions. In an early episode that went viral, Fielder convinces a coffee shop to change its name to “Dumb Starbucks” as a marketing stunt, but consults a lawyer to help him walk the shaky line of parody law and avoid legal trouble.
“If you just said that, you know, Theranos was a bit of a charade, maybe you could get away with it,” Fielder tells Holmes.
“It was real.”
“I was just making a little joke. Maybe it was in bad taste.”
We already know that Elizabeth Holmes is not innocent. What we still can’t understand, however, is whether she truly believes she did nothing wrong. Even during his trial – listening to testimony from investors who lost hundreds of millions of dollars, from whistleblowers who were silenced when they reported that Theranos’ blood testing machines didn’t work, and from patients who acted on incorrect blood test results – Holmes never wavered.
In all of Fielder’s metatextual comedy, even his most respectful fans can’t figure out when he’s acting, when he’s being himself, and whether Fielder himself even knows where to draw that line.
In this way, Fielder is like Holmes: after more than a decade in the public eye, viewers remain captivated by each of their ambiguous characters.
“The world believes a reality about me that is not true,” she told Fielder. “I know I didn’t commit any crime.”
(The remainder of this review contains spoilers.)
When filming began, The New York Times had just published a profile of Holmes, which was widely criticized at the time for allowing Holmes to portray herself as an innocent mother deprived of the chance to see her children grow up.
And yet Holmes and her husband, hotel heir Billy Evans, were furious about the article.
At one point in an interview, Holmes told the Times reporter that she was not offended by actress Amanda Seyfried’s portrayal of her in the Hulu miniseries “The Dropout” because “they’re not playing me. They’re playing a character that I created.”
She and her husband insist the quote was taken out of context. They claim to have proof that Holmes actually said, “They’re playing a character they created,” relieving her of any implication that she admitted to concocting an inauthentic persona as CEO of Theranos.
Fielder repeatedly asks Evans to share this evidence so that he can prove that Holmes was misquoted. He never does.
Once Holmes shows up at the prison, Fielder is agonized as he tries to make something out of his month of footage. He calls on the perfect sidekick to help him unpack his confusing behavior: the very actress who plays him in “The Dropout.”
Fielder plays Seyfried a brutal clip from his time with Holmes, when he tries to watch “The Dropout” with the subject of the series. When they come to a tense scene involving Holmes’ manipulative ex-boyfriend and former Theranos partner in crime, Sunny Balwani – who is also now in prison – Holmes can no longer stand watching this fictional version of herself. She turns away and cries.
In other words, Seyfried is watching Holmes react to Seyfried’s portrayal of Holmes, who was probably playing a character herself. But Seyfried isn’t the only one creating a crude approximation of the real Elizabeth. Evans built a realistic AI avatar of his wife, trapped inside a large vertical screen that he rolls over to the dinner table to sit with him and his children as if she were actually there.
The rest of the film is a constellation of colliding characters. Although this is a non-fiction documentary, it’s clear that everyone involved is also, to some extent, acting in front of the cameras. How could they not? Seyfried’s determination to understand Holmes’ story seems pure, but it’s not lost on audiences that she just played an important role in one of the most talked about films of the year.
Meanwhile, Evans behaves in such an unfathomable and egregious manner that he may even intentionally play the role of villain to garner sympathy for his reviled wife.
Evans knows that Fielder and Oppenheim are not convinced of Holmes’ innocence. This documentary will not make anyone believe that their wife is wrongfully detained in federal prison. But Evans comes off as so terribly unsympathetic that some audience members may leave the theater feeling bad for Holmes, seeing her as a victim and allowing her to double down on another persona she adopted during her trial: a harmless, docile woman who was manipulated by her ex-partner into unconsciously telling a cascade of increasingly harmful lies.
Once Holmes is in prison, Fielder is not allowed to bring recording devices when he visits him, so he tries to write a script of their conversations from memory, struggling to accurately recreate the nuances of a conversation where every last word has immense meaning. With Seyfried reprising his role from “The Dropout,” we see the duo practicing reading the script, tweaking the language while Fielder tries to remember Holmes’ exact phrasing and delivery.
As Holmes, Seyfried says, “People think Amanda’s show is a documentary. I’m treated worse (in prison) because of the way she portrayed me.”
Reading the lines, Seyfried breaks character.
“I didn’t do that,” the actress says. “She did this to herself.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This does not affect our editorial independence.
Gn entert
