Elizabeth Holmes has eyes like flying saucers. They’re perfectly spherical with bulging corneas, a perfect shade of blue. Her cheeks are plump like candy apples, her two front teeth sit like a bunny rabbit’s. She tucks her blonde hair behind her ears to reveal their elven point. We have been trained to think of the failed Theranos founder as conniving; a liar who scammed many wealthy, important people out of millions of dollars, promising an innovative, life-changing technology that didn’t exist in the way she had said it did. But when you see her face up close in her own home—as is the case in many frames of Nathan Fielder’s new documentary You Can See Everything—she resembles a trustworthy character from a kid’s cartoon, one in the midst of a breakdown. Perhaps that’s part of the reason why she agreed to let Fielder, a metafictional comedic master, into her home in the days leading up to her lengthy imprisonment on wire fraud charges. Maybe she was hoping someone would find the softness in her.
This is often the motivation behind malaligned people sitting down with a journalist or documentary filmmaker: to reclaim the narrative and tell their side of the story. It typically makes for an absorbing watch, but seldom does the subject come out looking better than they did before. So how do you display honesty when the world knows you as a convicted deceiver? You show everything, as Holmes and her partner Billy Evans did.
That is, in part, what You Can See Everything is about: Nathan Fielder being in the uninhibited company of Holmes and Evans in the final moments of freedom Holmes had. For the two weeks of the month Fielder and the film’s production team spent in their home, Fielder slept in their guest house. The justification? That they have nothing to hide. But the film acts as a twisting statement of the effective means of performance and deception. Based on that teaser trailer—featuring Holmes’ quietly trembling face—you might expect this to be a portrait of a lying psychopath, but Fielder is too smart to not let a question mark hang over that statement. Fielder might have the cameras, but he’s in the four walls of their home. So who’s film is this?
The film is a few minutes’ shy of three hours long, but is stuffed with so much delicious filling that it never drags or feels indulgent. In fact, it’s fun to watch just how much Holmes and Evans are willing to convince us of their probity. For Evans, that manifests in his willingness to let the camera crew film him at the gym, or fully naked in the shower, despite neither feeling relevant to disproving Holmes’ guilt. Meanwhile Holmes wants you to know that this cunningness she’s accused of is purely a misunderstanding. She speaks in impossible absolutes, at one point claiming to have never lied in her adult life. But when she’s asked to explain how she sold Theranos technology to potential investors, she refuses to accept the hazy semantics of the language she used.
One brilliant scene—not a spoiler—sees Fielder hook up his laptop to their TV, and show them the Abbott and Costello sketch “Who’s on first?”, in which two men quibble about how to identify baseball players. The gag is that they’re both saying different versions of a similar sounding sentence, “Who’s on first?” and “Who is on first.” Holmes watches it, glassy eyed with a weird grin, and admits to finding it funny. But the joke about the hazy language goes over her head completely.
You Can See Everything feels like an attempt to dissect the intelligence of its protagonist, asking whether her feigning ignorance comes from a genuine lack of awareness, or an active attempt to prove she was innocent all along. And if it’s the latter, how much can Fielder resist that persona she’s keen to put forth? It’s a compelling disaster movie for its subjects, impossible to untangle, about opaque narratives, power, and the gymnastics of language—and then the second half begins. That’s where the truly wild and unpredictable material is.
I spoke to the daughter of The Devils’ costume designer Shirley Russell this week, and we got to share some sketches that are nearly six decades old. It’s getting re-released in the US this weekend!
Everyone’s sick right now, right?
La Bola Negra hits US cinemas this weekend too, a transportive and thrilling movie that bowled me over at Cannes this year. It’s about the intertwined lives of three gay men across a century, and features fascism, Grindr, and full frontal male nudity. Everyone I’ve met who’s seen it has adored it. Read my review here and my interview with its maverick directors here.
A song I like that I stole off someone’s story this week: “Una Musica Brutal” by Gotan Project.
