“You Can See Everything” premiered last month at a surprise screening at the Telluride Film Festival, and the buzz afterwards was immediate: don’t read anything about this documentary beforehand. I tried to follow that advice myself, and I’m going to avoid major spoilers in this review. But it’s open knowledge that Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced businesswoman, is the film’s main subject — she’s in the trailers — so I can cover some of the story without ruining any of its twists and turns other than, perhaps, the set-up for its first act. I also believe knowing at least a little about Holmes, while not strictly needed, can enhance your enjoyment of what is easily one of the best, most provocative movies of the year.
Elizabeth Holmes is someone who buzzed around in the back of my brain from the news without any specifics making a strong impression. She founded a half-billion-dollar company called Theranos, which supposedly was developing a device that could perform hundreds of medical diagnostic tests by using a single drop of blood. In the 2010s, Holmes became a poster child for female entrepreneurs, celebrated by presidents and featured on magazine covers. She was a visionary who was going to radically change health care! For years, Holmes and her partner, Sunny Balwani, managed to conceal from investors that their device didn’t work. Eventually, Holmes’s deceit was uncovered. Convicted of fraud, she’s now serving a prison sentence. Her story has already been told in books, in an HBO documentary called “The Inventor” and in a Hulu mini-series, “The Dropout.” (I watched both of them in anticipation of this movie; checking out an episode or two of “The Dropout” is worth the effort if you have the time.)
Before Holmes went to jail, she and her current romantic partner, Billy Evans, invited Nathan Fielder to film her final weeks of freedom. Fielder is a quirky comic and creator who is responsible for TV shows like “Nathan for You” and “The Rehearsal.” His specialty is mixing artifice with reality; in “The Rehearsal,” for example, he concocted elaborate set-ups in which a woman who was considering motherhood could practice what it would be like to have a child, using situations with real kids. Frequently, the source of Fielder’s humor is making people uncomfortable, cringe comedy, and up until now, I wasn’t much of a fan. But for some reason, Billy Evans thought Fielder was the right person to reveal Holmes’s complexity.
He was right, although maybe not in the way he anticipated. The pairing of Holmes and Fielder in “You Can See Everything” has resulted in an audacious exploration of truth and how well two people can know one another. As Holmes and Fielder spend time together, she insists that she did nothing wrong, that her only aim was to make lives better. Fielder confronts her claims — after all, she was convicted of crimes — while trying to understand her psyche. She is a very convincing woman; I mean, she had managed to entice investors to give her hundreds of millions of dollars, and to attract board members like Henry Kissinger and George Shultz.
As I watched Holmes and Fielder together, many questions arose. Does she have some kind of pathology? Is she simply the world’s greatest liar? Is she really blind to her misdeeds? Is she actually an idealistic dreamer without boundaries? The more they interact, the more Fielder feels like he’s tumbling down a rabbit hole to a land where he can’t get his feet on the ground. Nor can a viewer. The sensation is shake-your-head incredulity. But your fascination grows.
Fielder ups the ante by moving in with Holmes and Evans (and their two infants), and he gets continually disoriented. Complicating the situation further is Evans. He and Holmes are totally enmeshed with one another. Is he manipulating her? Is she using him for his money? Is he using her for fame? Fielder is amusing both in his bafflement and in his attempts to understand them. Yet he takes his responsibility as a documentarian seriously and asks hard questions, even when his discomfort is clear.
Meanwhile, Holmes’s time to report for her jail term gets closer.
And the movie gets wilder.
“You Can See Everything” is a fleet three hours long, and what I’ve written here covers in general the first third of the film. To say any more would be to ruin the movie’s twists. By the end, I felt like I had entered a hall of mirrors. I could no longer tell who was lying, who was acting, who was sincere, who was gullible, who was a villain, who was pretending, who was just trying to make it through the day, who was playing fair or who was unethical. And I also contemplated what role the media should play in depicting an actual person’s life.
Fielder and his co-director, Lance Oppenheim, take some risky gambits, and then they push them even further. Against logic, Holmes and Evans go along with their ploys. I sometimes thought about Fielder: “You aren’t going to try that!” And then he does. And despite the craziness of what he attempts, the gambles work and increase the movie’s complexity.
I’ve tried to convey the impact of the film rather than many specifics. (But frankly, were you to find out about the movie’s big surprise in advance, your enjoyment would only be affected slightly.) The picture’s dynamics shift so often that even the end cards cause you to think again about what you just witnessed. “You Can See Everything” captures something essential about the elusivity of human interactions, and it will change your ideas about what a documentary can do.
“You Can See Everything” Directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim. Running time: 2 hours and 54 minutes. Rated R for language and some graphic nudity.
