Elizabeth Holmes with her child under the gaze of Nathan Fielder.
A24
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A24
You can see everythingthe new(ish?) documentary film about convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, is best treated as two films stitched together. The first 90 minutes or so, filmed before she went to prison, is a relatively straightforward chronicle by filmmaker Nathan Fielder and his collaborator Lance Oppenheim documenting Holmes’ last month at home with her partner, Billy Evans, and their children. The other 90 minutes are much more experimental, as the story picks up two years later without Holmes being available for the film. Fielder and Oppenheim treated their approach to this part of history as secret; I won’t spoil it.
Fundamentally, the film makes a much better impression as a mixture of reality and invention – and not just in the way it presents itself – than 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, is about the scrambled eggs.) Ironically, given its title, the best way to enjoy the film is not to watch it too closely.
This is going to be difficult for people who, like me, are Theranos completists. Numerous reports and investigations have been carried out on Theranos, and on Elizabeth Holmes in particular. Yet Fielder, who develops a close bond with Holmes over the course of the film, seemingly chooses to trust his instincts and his own conversations with her above all else, and he develops a sort of inability to decide what to think about what she did. He also suspects, rightly, that she might be trying to play him, at least at first. This is familiar territory for people who encounter her: even in Alex Gibney’s excellent 2019 documentary. The inventorthe question of Holmes’ intention upsets some. Did she convince herself that some sort of “fake it until you make it” approach wasn’t really a lie? Was she so capable of deceiving others that she was deceiving herself?
You can see everything presents some of these same questions, but it stacks the deck to answer them by tossing aside some of the evidence that seems, at the very least, to shed some light. For example, when Holmes tells Fielder that she never lies – has never lied in her life – he is skeptical, but he responds by asking her about things like white lies. Surely she lied from time to time? Have you avoided a social obligation by pretending to be sick? No? She seems open to the possibility that she could to have, in these very limited situations, but certainly never, ever, anything important.
As he ponders what to make of this assertion of hers, Fielder wonders if she might not, in fact, have lied to her investors as such. For example, he wonders whether a misunderstanding of the word “can” could exonerate her, and whether the rah-rah claims she made about the capabilities of her technology were therefore intentionally false. Maybe, he wonders, she was just using the word “may” in one sense and her investors meant 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, is wondering. It is impossible to know whether filmmaker Nathan Fielder, in his own mind, is actually wondering about these things, just like the distance between these two Fielders.)
The problem with spending so much time on this narrow question of what “may” means is that it is not, by any means, the only thing, or the only kind of thing, that Elizabeth Holmes has been accused of lying about. For example, at her trial, Holmes was accused of falsely claiming that her technology was used by the military on the battlefield, a claim that doesn’t lend itself as easily to a “it depends on your definition of “can” linguistic analysis. But at least in the final edit, 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.
Likewise, when he wonders whether Holmes has malicious intentions or is simply misunderstood because she’s too literal (and, the film strongly implies but doesn’t actually say, neurodivergent), he never asks her about the whistleblowers who said she tried to ruin their lives with threats, lawyers, and private investigators. If true, it would lend credence to the idea that she knew she had a lot to hide, rather than innocently giving investors the wrong idea. This consciousness of guilt seems to be precisely the problem in question. Why not talk to him about it?
This selective attention and inattention even extends to what happens between subjects and filmmakers. Fielder becomes obsessed at one point, as communication with Evans breaks down, over the terms of the pair’s deal with A24 – and whether they would profit from the film. Fielder wonders what Holmes knows about financial trading and what Evans may (or may not) have shared with her. But…presumably, Fielder has access to all the documents they signed, since it’s his film. The obvious question is: what, if anything, did Holmes sign and what did he say? There are suggestions that she might not have needed to sign anything, but that seems murkier than it should. When Fielder, the on-screen character, ignores the evidence that it seems Fielder, the filmmaker, should have – and fails to explain why – the uncomfortable feeling that deliberate sleight of hand is seeping through. (And again, some variety of sleight of hand with re-enactments and the like is indeed part of Fielder’s usual box of tricks; this is different, especially if he’s not transparent about whether he’s doing it.)
Fielder aficionados, of which there are many, will tell you with enthusiasm that this perplexity is the essence of his methods and his style. He wanna you find it all very trippy, you wonder what is real and what is not. He wants you to wonder what to think, including about him. It’s true, and he’s very good at it, and it works exceptionally well when the ambiguity is rooted in the messy nature of a real situation and the strange nature of human behavior, as is the case in the film’s treatment of some of the underlying dynamics of Holmes and Evans’ relationship. It seems a little hollower and more manipulative if the questions are artificially rendered unanswerable by setting aside the available evidence.
If you treat You can see everything as a sort of blend of fact and fiction, which it more blatantly becomes in its second half, this is a supremely competent piece of filmmaking that tugs at precisely the threads it wants to say. This creates a grayer-than-gray version of Elizabeth Holmes who, believably, might actually be primarily the victim of many misunderstandings and poor relationship choices. Seeing Fielder struggle with this possibility – particularly as someone who touched it, during the second season of The repetition, about his own ambivalence about being diagnosed as neurodivergent – is truly gripping. It’s even touching, perhaps.
But if you read John Carreyrou’s Bad bloodand if you listen to the accompanying podcast, and if you watch The inventorand if you read about what happened during his fraud trial, it’s fair to wonder if You can see everythingElizabeth Holmes’ version of Elizabeth Holmes is, at its heart, a creation of the filmmakers that might do a disservice to the people who view her as real, as well as the people who suffered the real-life consequences of her actions. Not just Theranos investors, but regular people who reported getting incorrect test results from Theranos machines, as well as whistleblowers and others who worked for it and were sucked into its orbit.
Fielder and Oppenheim’s “Liz” is put together at least in part through the clever use of negative narrative space – leaving in what supports that “it’s complicated, who knows?” version of her and leaving aside anything that suggests that in reality it might be very ridiculous, and that she might not be that different from anyone else committing large-scale fraud. The fact that a manager did not initially intend to defraud anyone does not mean that there was no dishonesty. Even the co-creator of the Fyre Festival, who was also convicted of fraud, might have hoped it would be a big success in the early stages of planning. He was probably sad to go to prison too.
“It’s Not That Deep” isn’t really a three-hour documentary line, and it wouldn’t make as interesting a film as this. What if it was actually the truth?
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