“Isn’t it weird that I like, did a TV show about kind of a business scam, and you got in trouble for like… a business scam?” comedian and filmmaker Nathan Fielder gently asks Elizabeth Holmes.
One month before the notorious Theranos CEO surrendered to begin her eleven-year criminal fraud sentence in 2023, Holmes and her husband contacted A24 as a last-ditch effort to exonerate her in the public eye, suggesting they send a film crew to document her final days of freedom. Alongside director Lance Oppenheim, Fielder — a cringe-comedy mastermind whose work often walks the line between fact and fiction — embraced the impossible project of figuring out who the infamous Stanford dropout really is.
“I never actually made that connection,” says Holmes. “I think it’s a pretty different situation.”
No one is better prepared than Fielder to probe the depths of Holmes’ psyche. His satirical docu-reality show “Nathan for You” catapulted him to cult stardom as he assumed the role of an exaggerated, deadpan version of himself who tries to help struggling small business by executing asinine interventions. In one early episode that went viral, Fielder convinces a coffee shop to change its name to “Dumb Starbucks” as a marketing stunt, but consults a lawyer to help him toe the flimsy line of parody law and escape legal trouble.
“If you just said that, you know, Theranos was a comedy bit, maybe you could get off scot free,” Fielder says to Holmes.
“It was real.”
“I was just kind of making a little joke. Maybe it was in bad taste.”
We already know that Elizabeth Holmes is not innocent. What we still can’t figure out, though, is whether she really, truly believes it when she says she did nothing wrong. Even as she sat on trial — listening to testimonies from investors who lost hundreds of millions of dollars, whistleblowers who were silenced when they flagged that Theranos’ blood testing devices didn’t work, and patients who acted on incorrect blood test results — Holmes never wavered.
Across Fielder’s body of metatextual comedy, even his most reverent fans can’t quite figure out when he’s acting, when he’s being himself, and if Fielder himself even knows where to draw that line anymore.
In that way, Fielder is just like Holmes: after over a decade in the public eye, onlookers remain captivated by each of their ambiguous personas.
“The world believes a reality about me that isn’t true,” she tells Fielder. “I know I didn’t commit any crime.”
[The rest of this review contains spoilers.]
Early on in filming, The New York Times has just published a profile of Holmes, which was widely criticized at the time for allowing Holmes to portray herself as an innocent mom deprived of the chance to watch her kids grow up.
And yet, Holmes and her husband, hotel heir Billy Evans, were livid about the article.
At one point in an interview, Holmes tells the Times reporter that she wasn’t offended by actress Amanda Seyfried’s portrayal of her in Hulu’s miniseries “The Dropout” because, “They’re not playing me. They’re playing a character I created.”
She and her husband insist that the quote was taken out of context. They claim that they have evidence that Holmes actually said, “They’re playing a character they created,” relieving her from any implication that she admitted to concocting an inauthentic persona as CEO of Theranos.
Fielder asks Evans multiple times to share this evidence so he can prove that Holmes was misquoted. He never does.
Once Holmes reports to prison, Fielder is agonized as he tries to make something out of his month of footage. He calls in the perfect sidekick to help him dissect her confounding behavior: the very actress who portrays her in “The Dropout.”
Fielder plays Seyfried a brutal clip from his time with Holmes, when he tries watching “The Dropout” with the subject of the series itself. When they get to a tense scene involving Holmes’ manipulative ex-boyfriend and former Theranos partner-in-crime Sunny Balwani — who is also now in prison — Holmes can no longer bear to watch this fictional version of herself. She turns away and cries.
In other words, Seyfried is watching Holmes react to Seyfried’s portrayal of Holmes, who was probably also playing a character herself. But Seyfried is not the only one creating a crude approximation of the real Elizabeth. Evans has constructed a life-like AI avatar of his wife, trapped inside of a large vertical screen that he wheels over to the dinner table to sit with him and his kids as though she’s actually there.
The remainder of the film is a constellation of colliding personas. Though it’s a non-fiction documentary, it’s clear that everyone involved is, to some extent, also performing for the cameras. How could they not? Seyfried’s determination to understand Holmes’ story seems pure, but it’s not lost on the audience that she just scored a leading role in one of the most talked-about films of the year.
Meanwhile, Evans behaves in such an unfathomably egregious manner that he may even be intentionally playing the villain to drum up sympathy for his reviled wife.
Evans knows that Fielder and Oppenheim are not convinced of Holmes’ innocence. This documentary will not sway anyone to believe that his wife is being wrongly held in federal custody. But Evans makes himself appear so appallingly unlikable that some viewers may leave the theater feeling bad for Holmes, seeing her as a victim, and allowing her to double-down on another persona she adopted while on trial: a harmless, docile woman who was manipulated by her ex-partner to obliviously tell a cascade of increasingly harmful lies.
Once Holmes is in jail, Fielder is not allowed to bring recording devices when he visits her, so he tries to write a script of their conversations from memory, struggling to accurately recreate the nuances of a conversation where every last word carries immense meaning. With Seyfried reprising her role from “The Dropout,” we see the pair practice reading the script, editing the language as Fielder tries to recall Holmes’ exact phrasing and delivery.
In character as Holmes, Seyfried says, “People think Amanda’s show is a documentary. I get treated worse [in prison] because of how she portrayed me.”
As she reads the lines, Seyfried breaks character.
“I didn’t do that,” the actress says. “She did that to herself.”
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