'You Can See Everything' A24 Elizabeth Holmes would like you to know that she has never lied. Not just about Theranos — about anything ever, she insists, her startlingly large eyes shining with conviction. She’s only been misunderstood because she thinks so differently, or misrepresented by outside parties pushing their own cynical agenda.
You Can See Everything, a new documentary about the billionaire turned convicted fraudster, is ostensibly her attempt to change all that. In the spirit of radical transparency, she intends to finally get her real story out there, once and for all.
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You Can See Everything
The Bottom Line Smart, funny and full of surprises. Venue: Telluride Film Festival Directors: Nathan Fielder, Lance Oppenheim 2 hours 54 minutesBut if you’ve ever seen anything by its directors, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, you’ll already know better than to expect something so simple. What begins as a fascinatingly intimate portrait of a deluded or disingenuous scammer reveals as something even wilder, more ambitious and less predictable, until we’re left to ponder what value a personal truth has at all.
The nearly three-hour film, which had its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, splits cleanly into two halves. In the first and more straightforward, Fielder (and Oppenheim, and their crew, though of that contingent it’s only Fielder we see regularly) essentially embed in the beachside San Diego rental where Holmes, her partner Billy Evans and their two young children are enjoying the last weeks before Holmes is due to report to a Texas federal prison for an 11-year sentence.
There, You Can See Everything is only too happy to satisfy the voyeuristic curiosity that probably brought you here in the first place. Fielder seems to be lurking behind every doorframe and around every corner, taking in every emotional conversation or casually intimate moment. (The couple’s very different approaches to scrambling eggs turns out to be weirdly telling.) His high tolerance for awkwardness means he’s willing to ask the questions we’re all thinking but might hesitate to pose ourselves — like “Why?” when Evans speaks about choosing to be a part of Holmes’ life essentially at first sight, despite the very public and sordid details of her then-recent downfall.
Fielder’s presence in front of the camera (and eventually in their guest room, which comes with no mattress because Evans claims to prefer sleeping on bare bedframes) also means You Can See Everything dispenses with any pretense of “objectivity.” What it aims for, instead, is a kind of authenticity — the sense that it’s earnestly trying to understand Holmes’ mind and motives, even if the filmmakers don’t appear to believe for a second that she’s as innocent as she says; that Holmes really is trying her best to communicate her line of thinking, even if it requires Olympic-level mental gymnastics to justify it.
The documentary’s time with the family is fruitful, in that they reveal Holmes’ psychology as a fleeting paparazzi photo or a carefully managed puff piece never could. And were You Can See Everything just a profile of Holmes on the eve of her sentence, it would be a captivating if slightly baggy document in itself, with no shortage of moments to make you groan or goggle your eyes.
But it’s the second half, which picks up two years later, where the movie really kicks into gear. Its abrupt turns are so deliciously surprising I’m loath to give away too much detail. But I’ll say broadly that it gets excitingly meta and almost surreal in confronting the fact that Holmes is now in prison, and therefore unable to speak for herself in any length or depth. Control of her narrative has once again slipped outside her hands, and in her absence, the void gets filled by other means.
One is Evans, who’s all too happy to speak on his partner’s behalf, down to posting as her from her verified X account. He doesn’t even need to consult with her to say what she thinks about this or feels about that, because their souls are just that united — never mind that he’s clearly an angry boor with controlling tendencies, or that he disregards her actual, previously-stated-on-the-record opinions whenever they’re inconvenient. Remember what I said about this film not pretending to be objective? It makes no bones about the fact that it absolutely loathes this guy.
Another sticky version of Holmes’ narrative is the Hulu show The Dropout; though it came out before Holmes’ incarceration, it continues to shape the public’s perception of her to a degree that all the other articles and books and podcasts about her have not. Just ask the barber who explains the plot of the miniseries to Billy during a cut and shave.
But yet another, You Can See Everything is shrewd enough to realize, is itself. Even as Holmes has tried to explain herself, our understanding of her has already been filtered through the questions Fielder asks, through his and Oppenheim’s impression of her level of sincerity, through the choices they’ve made about which interactions to leave in and which to cut out. There’s also the barest suggestion that Fielder may have an eensy crush on Holmes — though the fact that the picture hints at said crush without stating it outright could just be another pointed example of how easily we can be manipulated into inferring the thoughts and feelings of other people.
An increasing reliance on simulacra (supposedly necessitated by Holmes’ absence, but you’re not going to convince me the guy behind The Rehearsal wasn’t just dying to reenact some conversations in a recreation of the Bryan Federal Prison visitors room) adds another giddy layer of artificiality in this ostensible search for truth — as does the introduction of a third co-conspirator who lightly interrogates Fielder in the way he once did Holmes, and finds he’s as capable of evasiveness as anyone else.
In one scene, this new colleague and Fielder find themselves outraged on Holmes’ behalf that a crass X response posted by Evans through her account “does not sound like her.” They’re almost certainly right, based on what we’ve seen of Holmes — and they also have about as much authority to determine what Holmes would or would not say as anyone who isn’t Holmes herself does. You Can See Everything reaches for accuracy in its portrayal of a much talked-about figure. It ends up asking, with plenty of humor but no small amount of wisdom, what “accuracy” would even look like in the first place.
Full credits
Venue: Telluride Film Festival Distributor: A24 Production companies: Blow Out Productions, To Be Formed Productions Directors: Nathan Fielder, Lance Oppenheim Producers: Nathan Fielder, Lance Oppenheim, Tatiana Bears, Maggie Ambrose, Jack Davis Executive producer: Emily Osborne Director of photography: David Bolen Production designer: Alex DiGerlando Editor: Adam Locke-Norton Music: Ari Balouzian 2 hours 54 minutesTHR Newsletters
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