Ever since the first trailer went up for “You Can See Everything,” if not since word of the movie got up, schadenfreude lovers have been rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of Elizabeth Holmes getting more of what’s coming to her. Especially knowing that Holmes and her husband Billy Evans actually sought out Nathan Fielder, who exudes a natural skepticism, to make the documentary, there’s been an anticipatory bloodlust, that they must have been fools to imagine they were doing anything but helping set their own trap. That’s not a completely ill-founded expectation: Holmes comes off in the doc as every bit as innately bizarre as anyone showing up for a cinematic freak show might hope. But the weirdest thing about the movie might be the fact that it at least allows for the possibility that the Evil Genius might be neither of the things contained in that descriptor, but rather somebody whose guileless act may not be that much of a put-on, because she’s dealing with some kind of mysterious damage we can only begin to guess at.
In other words, it’s a movie with some sympathy for the devil, or at least — given the admitted inconclusiveness of its findings — the suggestion that empathy may be possible. Which may be not what you’re expecting walking in to what looks like a hilarious 174-minute takedown. But the intentions of Fielder and his co-director, Lance Oppenheim, are embedded right in that first trailer that set the watching world ablaze. At the scene’s very end, when after a couple of minutes of Holmes smiling and staring earnestly into the narrator’s eyes, with a shaky head that makes it appear as if she’s developed some kind of anxious palsy, it’s revealed that she’s extending her left leg well off the couch to rock her baby. If you were watching that teaser carefully, the filmmakers were carefully signaling the whole movie: vast amounts of IRL comedic shock and awe, tinged with lingering bits of poignance as Holmes turns out to be a human being… if a still-unfathomable one.
So, let’s set a countdown for how long it takes for some souls on social media to begin calling Fielder a “cuck,” for having fallen prey to the manipulation of an obvious villain. But it’s not a movie that means to let Holmes off any hooks, only to ask some questions about where some of the invisible hooks in her impossibly strange life might lie. It’s a film that starts off with the intent to provide insight into a Leonard Nimoy-style Unsolved Mystery, with the idea that spending 34 days living with Holmes and Evans — and years of further production beyond her incarceration — would surely have to provide a few concrete conclusions about her psychology and/or crimes. Instead, by the end, it makes solving the puzzle of UFOs seem like a cinch by comparison. Abormal psychology: it’s the Ultimate Trip! But the idea that, amid that inability to form answers, we could at least further consider what makes her tick will seem risible and outrageous to some viewers… and is also what makes the film rich and re-visitable enough to deserve the Best Picture nomination it’s clearly lined up to get.
If there’s a great crux moment for the movie, it’s in the scene fairly late in the three-hour proceedings that involve a sort of postmortem between Fielder and the Very Famous A-List Personality whose appearance A24 has asked viewers to consider a spoiler. (Her name will be ubiquitous enough in the weeks to come, but we can honor the surprise for now.) Fielder confesses how confused he is, after spending months doing intensive filming of Holmes and her husband and immediate family — basically wondering if, against all odds, it is possible that she could be as guileless as she comes off 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Upon hearing that confession, the Very Famous A-List Personality does everything but literally slap Fielder, suggesting that he must be experiencing some kind of Stockholm Syndrome to have been pulled in by her act. At this, some filmgoers will be practically standing up and cheering for the A-lister — she has at that moment become the audience’s surrogate, or stand-in for at least part of it, urging the host/filmmaker to snap out of his delirium. But it won’t just be different viewers taking sides in this scene. It may be anyone watching the movie whose empathic and cynical sides are in roughly equal balance.
Where Fielder ultimately ended up on the issue of how sincere or Machiavellian Holmes is another unsolved mystery at the end of the movie, perhaps even to himself. When I caught the film at its Telluride Film Festival premiere (followed by a Q&A attendees weren’t allowed to record), Fielder basically said that he and others on the filmmaking team still had trouble figuring out exactly what they’d experienced in the process of making the movie — which is a fascinating conundrum, considering that, true to its title, Holmes and her husband did let them see just about everything it seemed possible to see. My personal hunch is that Fielder came away thinking Holmes is on the level, to the extent that someone who sometimes seems like an AI program’s idea of how a human should behave can be on the level. There are a few possibilities that might explain how Holmes comes off the way she does in the movie: (a) She is a simpleton. (b) She is a conniving sociopath who happens to be utterly brilliant at playing a simpleton. (c) Somewhere between those poles, she is the very emblem of a woman who throughout her life has put herself in the sway of controlling men, to the detriment of her intellect, willpower and emotional development.
And what about those impossibly wide, unblinking eyes, and that gentle Joker smile? Are these the hallmarks, as I’ve seen theorized throughout the internet, of someone who is deeply sociopathic at worst, or on the scale at best? Or just someone with Resting Beatific Face?
The sort of feminist lens is a powerful one, if you choose to go down that path of interpretation. Fielder and Oppenheim include a moment early in the film in which Holmes’ father blurts out that he believes things really started to change for his daughter when she was raped in her college days. On-camera, Fielder offers one of the quietly startled reaction shots that are a staple of the movie, and the topic never comes up again. The theme of her becoming the victim of powerful men continues — a little bit when the subject of Theranos co-founder Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani comes up (although recounting past history doesn’t take up much of this doc’s running time), and a lot when we get to the present day. Evans is as close as “You Can See Everything” has to a villain, and probably crosses the line into counting as one. Even he is treated as a rounded human being over the course of the film; he’s too candid and open about is intentions to count as a top-level devil, and it seems like he might actually love Holmes. But the succession of constant revelations about what he’s up to in the last hour of the movie make Holmes feel like a woman with virtually no personal agency, even before she goes to jail, let alone afterward, when he is making deals without her knowledge and keeping up a cocky, profane tweetstorm under her name that bears scant resemblance to her personality as we know it.
It may be not giving Holmes nearly enough credit for her misdeeds to suggest that she has actually spent most of her adult years as a puppet. Yet the portrait of her passivity in the face of an aggressive “let me handle everything” man never stops growing more startling as the film goes on… and has to feels at least a little real for anyone with much first-hand human-race experience.
Two scenes that explore Holmes’ seeming — and shocking — naivete stand out. (Neither of these count as major “plot” spoilers.) One comes early on when Fielder asks her if she’s ever lied, and when she says no, he asks the inevitable what-about-white-lies question. Even then, it’s a no, as Fielder almost begs her to admit that she understands the question and has told a fib or two to protect a friend’s feelings. Probably 99.99% of the population would surrender at the point — evil geniuses most of all — but Holmes can’t admit to even having falsely complimented a pal. Later on, there’s a mind-blowing scene in which Fielder uses the historically famous Abbott and Costello “Who’s on first?” sketch as a setup to explore how people’s communication paths might just blow right by each other. Holmes hasn’t heard of the skit, but after watching it, she says she sees what he’s trying to say… which itself turns out to be a white lie, because she finally admits that she just doesn’t get what’s going on between Abbott and Costello, at all. And it’s at this point that you might start to wonder if she is just developmentally disabled in some way.
Stunted in her growth, somehow, yet capable of convincing smart people to part with billions of dollars? Something here does not compute. And yet, intuitively, Holmes does not come off in this movie as someone with the kind of intellectual cunning to pretend not to understand an Abbott and Costello sketch that has entertained millions, or to not know what a white lie is. The enigma deepens.
But so does the possibility that, for all her sins, and for all her Stanford education, Holmes is a simple gal — not simpleton — suffering from an extreme case of not just serial male dominance but terminal Imposters’ Syndrome. (Which is something that, from the available evidence in the movie, she surely would not admit to, not least of all because she might never have heard of it.)
How people feel about Holmes after watching “You Can See Everything” might be the most divisive thing in America since… well, since Kelly Clarkson versus the Brooklyn boutique, the thing that has truly riven us as a nation. But one thing is clear: In this era of ever-shortening quick hits and hot takes, Fielder and Oppenheim’s luxuriously paced peering into someone’s soul feels like a balm, inconclusive or not. Is it possible that the more you learn about someone, the less you might know how to think about them?
To take a cue from Shakespeare: “You Can See Everything” suggests that there are more things in the heaven and earth that is just one person than are dreamt of in any of our philosophies. We could do worse than to have the possibility of sympathy thrown in amid those hours of head-scratching assessment.
(By the way, who is on first…)