Two weeks ago Sharp Tech received an email from a listener named Eli who demanded that Ben and I make a point of seeing Nathan Fielder’s Elizabeth Holmes documentary, You Can See Everything, and then discuss it on the podcast. We politely declined that request/demand on last week’s show, and for my part, I said I wasn’t interested in seeing it because I’ve never been a fan of Fielder’s shtick. It turns out, however, I lied.
Saturday afternoon, after encountering a flood of rapturous reviews, I couldn’t resist heading to a theater and participating in the zeitgeist myself. So for Eli, and because it will probably be another three months (or three years?) before Ben sees the movie, here are ten amateur film critic notes that won’t make it to Sharp Tech this week.
The first half of these are spoiler-free.
1. What a great title. What was Elizabeth Holmes hoping to gain by inviting a film crew to live with her family for the final 34 days before she surrendered to authorities for an 11-year federal prison sentence? And as to the access itself: were we really seeing everything? Both those questions are core to the project, and they are both inevitable follow-up questions to the eerie title of this film, which itself is drawn from a text message that Holmes sends Fielder, apparently while on camera wading in the ocean with her family. Great work all around.
2. The theater experience is important for this one. The film is an onion-peeling exercise that’s alternately hilarious, weird, and propulsive. Processing all that in a theater, as everyone goes on the journey together and laughs awkwardly or gasps at various twists, really elevates the experience. It’s been a long time since I had this much fun watching a movie with strangers, and if you’re on the fence about spending three more hours with the Elizabeth Holmes story, I strongly recommend not waiting for it to hit streaming. (Additional data point: my theater applauded afterward; that happened all the time when I lived in L.A., but basically never happens in D.C.).
3. It’s not a normal Nathan Fielder project. My primary issue with Fielder’s past work is that a lot of it seemed to come at the expense of normal people who were rendered the butt of the joke. In lieu of generosity, there’s a cruelty and awkwardness that’s just not very appealing to me. With selective editing and deadpan delivery and a bunch of normal people used as props, he seemed to be a more autistic version of Sacha Baron Cohen, a comedian I found funny when I was 15 years old but probably wouldn’t enjoy as much now (and Ali G was at least interviewing public figures). To the extent Fielder’s a defining millennial comedian or artist, I’ve always found that development kind of depressing (give me Andy Daly’s Review over Nathan For You, thank you very much).
That noted—and conceding that because I found his earlier work annoying, I haven’t seen either The Curse or The Rehearsal, both of which were adored by a bunch of people I respect—there was not very much of the Nathan For You DNA in You Can See Everything. Balanced by a co-director in Lance Oppenheim and confronting a subject who seemed to genuinely vex him, as well as subject matter that’s fairly serious (large-scale fraud and/or a woman leaving her fiancé and two children for 11 years), Fielder seemed genuinely curious and sincere throughout the filming process we saw on screen. As Fielder himself told Wired this week:
I definitely understand that people would project stuff onto a new project that feels like stuff I’ve done in the past. But this is a totally unique thing. It feels, to me, so different than what I’ve done before in the way it came together, in the way it functions, and what we’re able to explore in it.
Indeed, there’s some brutal (and funny) editing of Holmes’ fiance, Billy Evans, but the spirit of the project is not satirical or mean. It’s much better because of that shift in tone.
4. It’s the movie of the year. The movie presents about eight different threads of story, meta-story, and cultural commentary, all of which are stitched together with bracing, zoomed-in cinematography and an enjoyably haunting score. Beyond anything else, it was just exceptionally well-made. The movie clocks in at two hours and 55 minutes and I didn’t move to check my phone once. When I walked out of the theater, the first thing I said was, “I’ve never seen anything quite like that on screen.”
Particularly in an era when so much of Hollywood’s output is “reheated IP, true crime documentaries, and filler dressed as prestige,” this movie gets an A from me for attempting something completely distinct and executing it so well. (Digger also had this ambition, but its execution was kind of all over the place).
5. Documenting our cultural moment. Speaking of modern Hollywood: I’m often struck by the near-complete absence of shows or movies that capture what it feels like to be alive and processing the world right now. To state the obvious: social media is filtering everyone’s reality a little differently, bureaucracies of all stripes are failing, grift and graft appear to be widespread, polarized frustration is everywhere, while tech is both an escape and the thing everyone’s trying to escape from. And despite all that, modern life is often full of mirth (and memes). It’s weird.
Weirder still: art is supposed to make sense of the status quo, but the current generation tends to sidestep the challenge altogether. It feels like half of today’s best movies and shows are set in the past (or fantasy universes), and alternately, the outliers that do attempt to reckon with the implications of our information environment or technology’s impact on modern life are often brutally lame (The Social Reckoning, anyone?). In any event, I mention all this because there’s enough happening in this movie to draw all kinds of conclusions about what it means, what it’s saying, etc. But personally, I thought You Can See Everything did a better job than any work in recent memory at distilling the bizarre and disorienting reality we all inhabit together.
More on that below, but first, an intermission and a warning that from here on out, we’re entering spoiler territory.
6. I don’t believe that Elizabeth Holmes didn’t understand the “Who’s on First?” joke. About 45 minutes into the movie, Fielder plays Holmes two clips. The first is a recording of Holmes telling Fortune Magazine what a Theranos machine “can” do, which spawns some retroactive confusion over whether she was describing what it could do at the time of the interview (in which case she was outright lying) or what it could potentially do (in which case she was conveying its hypothetical potential as a diagnostics platform). The second clip is the Abbott and Costello routine above, where two men are talking past each other about baseball (who’s on first? A player named “Who.”).
Holmes laughs at the clip, but when pressed by Fielder, she admits she doesn’t understand what the joke is and becomes emotional, embarrassed and apologetic. That sequence is treated as both a potential allegory for the Theranos fraud and evidence that Holmes just thinks differently from the rest of us (an interpretation offered by Evans, who jumps in to explain his fiancee’s stammering with something along the lines of, “She just has such a beautiful mind; she’s not like us”).
For the record, I reject the premise of those takeaways. I think Holmes was lying about not understanding a very obvious joke, and doing so in service of framing herself as a misunderstood oddball. And why did she participate in this documentary and grant Fielder access to her family for the final 34 days before she went to federal prison for 11 years? To advance exactly that sort of narrative, which Fielder partially indulges (even if he doesn’t quite endorse it).
7. Amanda Seyfried takes the movie from good to great. Joining the movie about 100 minutes in, she was spectacular. Seyfried, who played Holmes in Hulu’s The Dropout, serves as an actor who helps Fielder recreate certain scenes that happened off camera (sidenote: a professional actor joining a documentary and then playing one of the primary subjects is a little bit like an NBA player joining a pickup game). She also appears as herself, confronting the madness of the story and all its characters, as well as her own role in Holmes’ public humiliation.
In the latter role, Seyfried serves as a stand-in for the audience over the final hour, and the movie becomes a rocket ship as soon as she arrives. The scene in which she and Billy Evans confront one another is probably the most exciting thing I’ve seen in a theater all decade. A24 is apparently pushing for Best Picture consideration and Best Supporting Actress consideration for Seyfried, and the movie deserves both awards.
8. Why is it wrong for Billy Evans to participate in the profits? In addition to Seyfried, that final hour seizes on a demand from Evans to receive a portion of the profits from the film. Holmes had left the room during the conversation at issue, and earlier in the process she’d claimed to Fielder that she wasn’t benefiting from the project. So did Billy make the demand without Holmes’ knowledge? Is this an example of the men in her life doing sordid, self-serving things that reflect poorly on Holmes (a repeat of Sunny Balwani at Theranos)? Or is Holmes the puppetmaster, leaving the room and maintaining plausible deniability while the men in her life do her bidding?
It’s a fun question that creates drama for the home stretch of the movie, but it’s a little bit ridiculous, right? This is not a conventional work of journalism. If the Holmes family were to profit from the project, it wouldn’t have undermined the integrity of the process in any meaningful way. To me, that focus was the clearest reminder that this was all a dramatic construction. Elsewhere, Fielder leans into questioning his own reliability as a narrator, and I’m still not sure how much of that was played up for narrative effect.
As for Holmes’ fiancé: the film does a lot of work to make Evans look like a vapid creep and a stand-in for an entire generation of tech hucksters; it’s very entertaining and frankly pretty convincing. I’m just not sure I buy the idea that seeking to profit from the last thing Holmes can do for a decade, with two young kids to support, is some kind of egregious ethical breach that’s an ominous echo of the Theranos grift.
8.1. Billy grabbing the eggs from Holmes’ hands is not necessarily evidence of a domineering relationship. My wife would do something similar, I think. But grabbing the bowl without saying a word, while claiming that he wanted to free up Holmes to focus, does make me wonder. (That I’m still debating this a week later is more evidence of the movie’s success).
8.2. Billy’s annoyed and jittery clarification on the E11EVEN nightclub is the funniest line in the movie. What a guy.
9. It’s not really a Holmes documentary. You might think that two hours and 55 minutes of firsthand interviews with the subject and her family would end with something close to a definitive look at a character who personifies a specific era of Silicon Valley hype and excess, but that’s not really what this movie is, or why it works. For one, the Holmes story has already produced an astonishing amount of mainstream content: a best-selling book, the aforementioned miniseries on Hulu, an HBO documentary from Alex Gibney, an ABC podcast, and probably a few other projects I’m forgetting. How much more is there to say?
Second, Fielder and Oppenheim ultimately narrow the story to specific questions like the meaning of “can,” the influence of controlling men in Holmes’ life, or one ominous line from Holmes’ father about rape (just before Evans interjects to shut down that line of questioning). Those themes add drama and intrigue to the three-hour movie (again, I didn’t check my phone once), but they also elide so much obvious and brazen fraud that they are genuinely misleading as to the objective reality of Holmes’ life and legacy. This is a woman who oversaw whistleblower intimidation, lawfare against critics, lies about co-signs from Pfizer and collaborations with Johns Hopkins, and a Theranos operation that passed off testing from third-party Siemens machines as the diagnostics results from the company’s now-infamous Edison. This was not, in fact, a big misunderstanding; nor was Holmes a bystander in the story. John Carreyrou, the Bad Blood author whose reporting broke the story of Theranos’ fraud 11 years ago, made similar points in his New York Times review last weekend and it’s a useful companion to the movie.
“Was Holmes mentally unstable or breathtakingly manipulative?” is a fair and interesting question, but I don’t think her role in the Theranos fraud is as ambiguous as the movie seems to imply. Fielder spent so much time interrogating whether Holmes believes her own lies that the final product obscures the scale and spectacle of the (demonstrable and uncontested) lies themselves. (Again, I can see why this project was appealing to Holmes).
10. What the movie does instead. Mediated by algorithms and populated by lots of charismatic liars, we live in an era with more transparency than ever, but also one without many reliable narrators. Fielder and Oppenheim nail that story in a pretty spectacular way.
Rather than didactic Sorkin-ese monologues, they make the audience feel the themes of modern life, and they make it fun to follow along. This won’t sound like praise, but the movie kind of reminded me of reading Twitter, where half the “For You” page is probably bullshit, but it can still be a great and thought-provoking time as long as you don’t take anything too literally. (Billy, for the record, is the human version of this tweet about using your LLC to buy a G-Wagon). The three hour focus on Holmes (and Seyfried, and Evans, and Fielder himself) is best understood as entertainment, not journalism (though Fielder does a great job asking perceptive questions throughout). But it’s entertainment that should resonate with anyone who’s paid attention to culture and media over the past 15 years.
Movies that are explicitly “about” our contemporary world usually fail because they’re less interesting, alive, and surreal than the object itself. What can work better is a hyper-specific story with universal themes. You Can See Everything is weird, it’s often funny, it feints at profound questions without ever really fleshing out answers, and it leaves audiences both titillated and bewildered by the end. It’s not a book. The internet, though? It gets awfully close.
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