Film Hedonist

When the first trailer for You Can See Everything dropped, it struck me as both captivating and confusing. Why beat the dead horse of a fraud story that was supposedly over, with its villain already punished for her crimes?

Soon I learnt that Holmes and her partner, Billy Evans, were planning a new version of Theranos’s blood-testing technology, and I realised the story wasn’t over after all. Still, there have already been plenty of attempts to document Holmes’s story. (The world will never be short of people who get an extra kick out of dragging a female villain, with an eagerness they wouldn’t spare a man.)

So why did Oppenheim and Fielder take an interest in this project at all? The film has its own answer to that, and it is stranger than you’d expect.

Oppenheim has only recently won over a wider audience with Primetime, his first move from documentary to fiction. In Primetime, he neither villainises his main character, Chris Hansen, the controversial host of To Catch a Predator, nor tries to make him look like a hero. Instead, he fictionalises Hansen to the point where the character becomes someone of his own, distinct from the real man.

Fielder has never been known for faithfully representing reality. In most of his work, he deconstructs and reconstructs it until it becomes a simulacrum. He is also known for being “socially awkward” and unmoved by the niceties most people give in to. On paper, the two seemed exactly the right people to approach a subject as controversial, and as famously manipulative, as Holmes and resist her charms.

Given who the directors are, expecting a Ken Burns documentary would have been ridiculous. So I went in with one main question: would this film offer some vindication to its main subject, or would it try to get to the root of how aware Holmes was of what was happening at Theranos?

Holmes has her own agenda. From the start, she makes it clear why we are here: to be told, again and again, that we were all wrong about her. Just as Oppenheim fictionalised Hansen, Holmes and Evans fictionalise her, and try to sell it as unfiltered reality.

We meet her 34 days before she reports to prison in Texas. Surprisingly, in these early scenes Holmes, now going by Liz, lives the life of a happy granola mom. She has recently given birth to her second child, and the cooing baby is attached to her torso at all times. She is tanner, with barely visible makeup, and her features are softer. She and Evans live in a humble (by millionaire standards), wood-panelled beach cottage in San Diego and are just like us: they cook eggs in the morning and spend their days torn between parental and professional duties.

She is not the Elizabeth Holmes you know from the media. More importantly, she is not the Elizabeth Holmes played by Amanda Seyfried in The Dropout, a portrayal Holmes finds so insulting and hurtful that, after watching a couple of episodes with Fielder, she breaks down in tears on her bed. Those won’t be the only tears we see on screen. The new Liz Holmes turns out to be deeply vulnerable and unafraid to open up to the camera. Or is she?

To say more would spoil the pleasure of watching this film unprepared. I’ll only say that the appearance of a surprise guest turns the tables and adds another layer of depth. The film has a lot to offer: I forgot about my drink for nearly three hours. It never lingers too long in one place, and it seems to be working itself out in front of our eyes, just as we are.

Visually, the film cuts between extreme close-ups of Holmes and her family and extreme wide shots of their surroundings. The effect is an uncomfortable, forced intimacy: we are pressed right up against her, yet never actually get close.

You Can See Everything is one of the most talked-about films of the year, and rightly so. It tells a compelling story without spoon-feeding its audience. Faced with an ocean of facts and myths surrounding Holmes, each viewer has to decide for themselves whether to dive into its cold waters and take it all in on faith, or stay on the shore.

The questions I left with weren’t about whether Holmes is good or bad, but about the documentary genre itself: how close to a subject is too close? At what point do the lines blur and a documentary lose its objectivity?

Immersed so deeply in her carefully crafted life, and present in almost every shot, Fielder doesn’t come out of this project unscathed. He tries to resist her charm and fails, having met his rival in Elizabeth Holmes. While he digs for what is real, she draws him into a freshly built hyperreality of her own, made of an idyllic beach cottage, inner fragility and radical honesty, and, inside his own film, constructs yet another distorted image of herself. Oppenheim, though never on screen, is what keeps the film in the realm of non-fiction.

So maybe, in the end, it isn’t about what Holmes is or isn’t, but about what our collective infatuation with her, and with her story, says about us. Maybe you really can see everything, and it was always simpler than we thought.