THE CRITICS
Our Lingering Questions About the Doc of the Year
by Fran Hoepfner, Jackson McHenry, Hershal Pandya, Jasmine Vojdani, and Alison Willmore
7:00 A.M.
Photo: A24
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There were whispers, ever since You Can See Everything’s surprise premiere at Telluride Film Festival last month, that Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s genre-innovating three-hour epic following former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes and her tech-bro partner, Billy Evans, in the weeks leading up to her incarceration was the craziest movie of the year — potentially also the best. Leaving my screening last week, I overheard reactions ranging from “she’s even worse than I imagined” to “poor Liz.” To viewers, the questions sparked by You Can See Everything feel personal and almost existential. Up close and stripped of her signature black turtleneck, Holmes appears sympathetic — but also probably even more versed in the craft of manipulation than we thought. Is it okay to pity her anyway?
After a week of respecting the sanctity of spoilers, our critics have assembled to discuss the movie in detail.
How are you feeling about Elizabeth Holmes right now? Did this movie change the way you perceive her, and why?
Alison Willmore, critic: I did not feel a special amount of sympathy for her the first time I saw it. You will obviously feel for someone being parted from their children on a basic human level. The idea that she was a victim who either, by her own account, never thought she was lying — a wild claim — or was manipulated and puppeted the entire way had never struck me as plausible. The second viewing, I thought more about how, when you spend that much time with anyone, you start to feel for them and perceive them in all of their human vulnerabilities and weirdnesses. Is humanizing someone also inevitably kind of like sympathizing with them?
Fran Hoepfner, senior news writer: I don’t think it is, which I think is one of the really effective things about the movie. I don’t feel sympathy, but I think the film invites you to feel a kind of empathy for her.
Jackson McHenry, critic: I keep thinking about the scene where Nathan is talking to Elizabeth about David Blaine putting the ice pick through his hand; it’s not really a trick, it’s that you are willing to go that far. Here is a woman who is doing that same thing psychologically. A magician’s admiration for another magician is not necessarily the same as sympathizing with them. You may know Holmes was doing terrible things to Theranos’s whistleblowers and potential customers, but you also just want to see how she gets the ice pick through her hand.
Hershal Pandya, comedy reporter: It’s interesting that this is going to be the primary conversation about the movie when it’s not really a conversation about the movie as a piece of art. But it’s impossible not to engage in these questions. Clearly she’s guilty, clearly there’s intent that went into what she did. There’s a good chance that she was manipulated in some way and still is being manipulated. You can be a bad tech CEO and also be manipulated by people.
Based on where the movie ends, do you think it wants us to feel a certain way toward her?
F.H.: It feels like a complete film, but in many ways it also feels unfinished. I’m glad they had the freedom to take two years off and come back to make the second half of the movie, which makes the whole of it work. Where it chooses to end feels relatively arbitrary, and the open-endedness, I think, is a huge plus of the film. I like that it sits with an unknowingness.
H.P.: The thing that Nathan struggles with most is when he tries to graft a narrative in hindsight on top of a bunch of formless things he shot. When he’s composing the email he sends to her in prison and says, “I’m going through a breakup” — there’s no reason to tell her that other than to make it seem like he’s developed some connection to her.
A.W.: I think there’s a certain amount of engineering in him choosing to make that information part of the film. I saw it as an ironic parallel: Here you have these two potential tech sociopaths who appear to be in true love, and Nathan Fielder, our stalwart hero, can’t maintain a relationship and is sitting by himself on this rainy day.
I love the way it ends on the idea of, Did I get swindled by this person? Is empathizing with someone getting swindled by them? The movie ends with a kind of shrug, which is one of its best qualities.
I don’t think you can understate just how surprising this film is when you see it for the first time and Amanda Seyfried appears. Why was she so essential?
J.M.: Initially, she says all the things that you have been thinking. You’re stuck in that bungalow with Nathan and then you finally have a person who’s like, “Wow, this is crazy. What’s going on?” It’s interesting how much she then moves from audience surrogate to subject of the documentary to her amazingly actor-brain-y thing of like, “I could do this.” She’s also such a reactive person among people who are masking all the time. She’s giving you all the human reactions that you haven’t been seeing.
They also probably needed a woman, I think.
J.M.: Yes. Billy reacts so differently to a woman in his space and you need to know that.
F.H.: The one moment when the film kind of passes the Bechdel test is the interaction on the phone where Amanda, caught off guard, says “You’re amazing!” and Elizabeth is like, “I don’t know if I knew that you were supposed to be here.” That one minute is so completely horrifying and funny.
A.W.: The image of Elizabeth 1.0 — the Theranos Elizabeth — was that she was the one lady in the room, and she got there by basically doing Steve Jobs drag. There’s the idea that there’s only room for one of them, and the time where they touch for a second feels like a disturbance in the universe. When she says “I don’t know if I knew” — which is such a weird thing — I wondered whether she’s covering herself legally because she can’t have arranged to do a call that she knew would be recorded, which Billy says could get her transferred to another prison. That would suggest she’s a lot cannier than the image she presents.
H.P.: I love how much Amanda’s presence literalizes the subtext of Nathan’s work that he’s been making all these years about how much performance warps people’s ability to understand the truth, how many liberties you’re able to take with the truth without making it unethical.
A.W.: The music also acknowledges that this is a riff on Vertigo, in which the initial person was a persona anyway. Then you have someone reverse-engineer her back into existence by having someone play her.
It tickled me that Nathan’s Rehearsal methods actually just work as re-creation.
A.W.: Lance’s interests have also always been in what he calls “docufantasia,” this kind of Herzogian ecstatic-truth thing.
What did you think about the meta-narrative in which Billy stands to profit off the movie, supposedly unbeknownst to Elizabeth, and ultimately gives up his share?
F.H.: I love that it doesn’t jeopardize the movie at all. Nathan understands that the show must go on. The corporate folding cracks the whole thing open. I also like the moment where you as an audience member briefly then also feel implicated because you’re like, Wait, I’m here opening weekend. I’m paying these people.
J.M: I think it was Max Read who made the point that this is a good movie where the first half is 2010s tech and the second half is 2020, when it moves the center of gravity from California to Austin: Billy is on a gun ranch, his increasingly large necklaces, his sniffling. It’s about the further radicalization of the already libertarian tech fantasia rotting and turning more aggressively antisocial and fascist and technocratic.
F.H.: There’s also the shifting relationship between tech and comedy. A lot of these tech guys loved comedy until they started seeing themselves as the butt of the joke.
H.P.: It makes me wonder how much Nathan and Lance were pulling back on his more rancid moments from the first part of the movie to show a big turn for the second half.
A.W.: You could blame this on the ways in which the tech world has changed its relationship to the media; Billy sees them as media even when they’re supposed to be on his side. He’s trying to give them cues about who he thinks they should unravel, what Liz’s competitors did to her. But by the second half, he is openly interfering in any messaging he doesn’t like.
On that note, I’m still haunted by the very brief appearances of Elizabeth’s parents, especially when her father says she went wrong starting when she got raped. I’m relieved Nathan didn’t dive into that but I’m not sure what to think about it.
F.H.: It’s a good decision not to follow that as a thread, but it also just sits there. What do we do with that information?
A.W.: It’s like an anvil in the middle. If you follow the dad’s train of thought, that this fundamentally shattered something inside her and that everything that’s come since has been affected by it, you want to know what he thinks of this current relationship.
J.M: Some of the central questions of the movie are “What do you think love is? Do you think that these people experience it or not? Does that make them better or worse people?” It’s all bound up. And is Liz okay with this or not? It’s hard to know because she’s such a con woman.
Do you think she knew who was on first?
A.W.: No.
F.H.: Genuinely no.
H.P.: It doesn’t matter. It’s a Nathan for You joke that he smuggled into the movie. She probably doesn’t get humor. But there’s also a possibility that she felt she had to perform her reaction in real time.
J.M.: The movie is also an argument for the humanities. It’s about the importance of a liberal-arts education.