film evaluation
YOU CAN SEE EVERYTHING
Running time: 174 minutes. Rated R (language and some graphic nudity). In theaters
Movies don’t come much wilder than “You Can See Everything,” Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s sensible, up-close-and-personal documentary about convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes that’s already the talker of the yr.
The Theranos founder with a husky voice and big freaky eyes out of a Walter Keane portray has endlessly fascinated the world since her story was dramatized on the 2022 sequence “The Dropout” starring Amanda Seyfried.
After that hit — a hit job in her estimation — Holmes grew to become a occasion impression, a Halloween costume, an “SNL” joke and a dinner desk subject. Whatever she is, most rational folks believe that what she did — deceptive the public and deep-pocketed traders that her “revolutionary” blood-testing machine really labored — was flawed.
But not off-her-rocker Holmes and her equally delusional and sometimes downright villainous fiancé, Billy Evans, who we meet in this actually surprising and invasive movie. This cuckoo couple’s credo is: harmless until effectively after confirmed responsible. Holmes, they say, is merely the sufferer of the courtroom of public opinion.
“Liz has been turned into this monster because nobody knows who she is,” Evans, lovable as a backyard snake, says. Seizing a well-liked, touchy-feely phrase, he insists his betrothed has been “othered.”
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So, he and Holmes invite oddball comic Fielder of all folks into their seaside home rental in San Diego, Calif., to doc the 34 days before she begins her 11-year jail sentence in Bryan, Texas. Well, that weird alternative has backfired for them, but it’s a seismically entertaining coup for us. Watching “You Can See Everything” is like being on Willy Wonka’s messed-up boat for three unbelievable hours.
“You Can See Everything” is a deeply intrusive, three-hour exploration of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. Courtesy Everett Collection
If the pair’s goal was to present that Holmes is completely regular, um, whoops! Over and over she stares frighteningly into the distance as if about to say, “Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my closeup.” Occasionally a single tear cascades down her cheek as in the current horror flick “Other Mommy.” Sorry, “Othered Mommy.” And while they do get the “human story” they hoped awkward, uncomfortable Fielder would ship, he’s a rather deft and dogged interviewer with a truffle hound’s nostril for a story.
“Have you ever lied in your life?” he well asks her.
Holmes, less of a human than “E.T.,” replies, “I don’t think so.”
Yeah, OK!
Fielder and Oppenheim’s sometimes humorous, continuously chilling, visually beautiful flick is uncommon, to say the least. This is not a doc of simple revelations such as these of “The Jinx.” Nor is it a clear rundown of occasions, like the Holmes film “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley” was. This is an intrusive character research that, in a stimulating and riveting method, muddies the scenario even more.
Nathan Fielder moved into Holmes’ home to movie her life in the lead-up to her jail sentence. Courtesy Everett Collection
We begin to surprise: Has Holmes repeatedly fallen prey to unhealthy males who take benefit of her attraction, such as her ex-boyfriend and Theranos co-founder Sunny Balwani and, cough cough, others? Are her actions actually their fault? Or does she gravitate toward these sorts of guys so they can act as an simple defend for her shrewd manipulations? Is she a good lady led astray or a prison mastermind?
We’re even more blended up as the digital camera’s focus goes to her lovely little youngsters, a child and a toddler. It’s exhausting not to really feel sympathy for a younger mom, or at least the children who are about to be separated from her for more than a decade.
If you know anything about jail, you know you can’t just take documentary cameras through the steel detector during visiting hours. So, once Holmes goes to the clink, Fielder and Oppenheim must get inventive for the second half — ensuing in some of the craziest stuff I’ve ever seen in a film.
Using transcripts from notes and reminiscences, Fielder takes the outdated workhorse of documentary reenactments and gives it a novel twist. But what begins out as just a intelligent and enjoyable concept warps into a darkish, meta experiment that verges on a psychological thriller. If we were already questioning what’s actual and what isn’t, it’s here when our brains explode and pool on the ground with the popcorn kernels and scattered Nerds.
Fielder filmed Holmes for 34 days before her sentence started. AP Photo/
Billy Evans (proper) is a main character in the doc. Getty Images
Most of Fielder’s time is spent from here on out with Evans, who we never like. But halfway through, we start to positively detest him. The man, who’s mystifyingly working to exhume Theranos from the start-up cemetery, is quickly to be the planet’s jackass du jour. A flagrant narcissist, he asks the digital camera crew to come movie him working out at the health club. And, lending credence to the title, at one level we watch him taking a bathe completely bare with full-frontal. But he’s also slimy with his companion.
As Holmes is beating eggs, he snatches the bowl away because he doesn’t like her whisking approach. When Fielder presses her on her shady verbiage — that her machine “can” carry out tons of of blood exams, as opposed to “is capable of” doing so with the proper chemistry developments — Evans condescendingly jumps in to say, “You were communicating very clearly in your mind.”
But Fielder even calls our antipathy toward Evans into query. Fans of actuality TV know that a season’s hero and the baddie can be decided, or at least amplified, in the modifying room. And at the finish of “You Can See Everything,” Fielder and Oppenheim recommend that perhaps our trusty interviewer favored one of these two more than the other, and that choice seeped into his unconscious.
Director Nathan Fielder must get inventive after Elizabeth Holmes goes to jail. Courtesy Everett Collection
Ding! Isn’t that precisely how this bewitching and fascinating girl grew to become the youngest-ever self-made billionaire in the first place?
The final takeaway of this completely sensational, reality-bending, unmissable documentary? With Elizabeth Holmes, we will never see everything.
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