All That Seeing Allows by Matt Fagerholm
Aside from Alex Gibney’s “Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie,” which is slowly making its way around the country in far too limited a release, no documentary—or cinematic work, for that matter—has caused my jaw to drop this year quite like Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s singular tour de force, “You Can See Everything.” There has never been anything like it, and I doubt there ever will be again, at least from this pair of filmmakers. After this picture’s widely publicized release, who is going to let a genius of performance art and deception like Fielder into their house to allegedly observe their every move in the last weeks leading up to their prison sentence? Did disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and her husband Billy Evans, a surefire contender for movie villain of the year, really think Fielder would be the one to improve the public’s perception of them?
There is much to be written about this picture, including the contributions of one Oscar-worthy artist who deserves their own appreciation piece, though that will have to wait until enough audiences have gotten to discover the film’s many twists themselves. What Fielder has made clear from the moment the film was first screened at Telluride is that he’s still processing all that he experienced while making this picture, and that he has yet to reach any solid conclusions about it. Is Elizabeth Holmes simply a pathological liar like her current supporter occupying the White House? Did she really think that saying her invention had the potential of working was the same as saying it actually worked (but never did)? How aware is she of the dishonest actions made by the men in her life, who seem all too keen on speaking for her? Is the emotion Fielder felt palpably radiating from her genuine, or the work of a master con artist?
What’s inarguable is that Fielder grows to feel sympathy for Holmes, especially after she’s gone to prison and her husband starts doing things he’s convinced she would find upsetting. I couldn’t quite follow Fielder on that journey, in part because Rebecca and I had just viewed Gibney’s documentary on Holmes, “The Inventor,” as well as the acclaimed miniseries, “The Dropout,” the titles of which, when paired, impeccably express the dichotomy of this elusive figure. Apart from giving people crucial health diagnoses that were false, the most damning action of Holmes, as depicted in both programs—but conspicuously missing from “You Can See Everything”—is her treatment of Ian Gibbons, the chief scientist at Theranos. His warnings about the product’s malfunctions led to his firing, followed by his rehiring in an expendable role, and ultimately his silencing, leading to his suicide in May of 2013.
As played by Amanda Seyfried in her career-best performance, Holmes—upon hearing the news of his death in “The Dropout”—is relieved, displaying no trace of remorse. If this moment was a true occurrence, I couldn’t care less if Holmes rots behind bars. But like any dramatization, did this scenario actually take place, or was it created by screenwriters to illustrate what they assume was going on in their subject’s unknowable mind? The great achievement of “You Can See Everything” is how it causes us to question the validity of anything that is presented to us as an objective truth, since any artistic work, including documentaries, is crafted subjectively. Is any subject really showing us their true selves, or simply what they want us to see? Neither Fielder nor Oppenheim have the answers, but they sure make you want to endlessly discuss the questions they raise.
As profoundly provocative as this film is, it must be said that it is also a wildly entertaining three hours that had me wanting to view at least three more. Many of the film’s biggest laughs arrive courtesy of Fielder’s typically unorthodox interview techniques, while the cinematography by David Bolen, editing by Adam Locke-Norton and tension-filled score by Ari Balouzian kept me entranced and on the edge of my seat from beginning to end. 2026 is far from over, but this just might prove to be the film of the year, or at least the one you’ll find yourself unable to stop thinking about.
There Is More Beneath the Surface by Rebecca Martin Fagerholm
After re-visiting “The Dropout,” and the Alex Gibney documentary before watching the Fielder and Oppenheim documentary, it set a foundation for this film. But you also abandon all of that when you are brought into the intimate reality of Holmes in these private moments at her home with her family. When I watched Nathan Fielder’s documentary “You Can See Everything,” I saw a woman who, just like her Theranos invention, has invented a fractured perception of the world and of herself.
Two particular scenes, in mind, stood out to me to defend this examination. One is her father’s admission about Elizabeth’s rape during a brief off-the-side conversation with Fielder. This was explored much deeper in “The Dropout,” and not covered at all in the Gibney documentary, but it is something that her parents, especially her father, a former Enron executive, was painfully aware of, and that he felt attributed to her downfall, leading to the romantic relationship she had with Sunny Balwani. I wish that was explored more, and it might have been with a female director.
But Fielder comes from a point of fascination about her psychology, never sure what is an illusion, or what is truth. For me, one scene stands out, when as a family, they cozy up on the couch, and watch Abbott and Costello’s classic “Who’s on First” routine, that Holmes claims she has never heard of or seen. She laughs, but admits she does not get the joke. It leaves you thinking, is she so detached from present reality that she does not understand the communal nature of a scene like this? Could this be connected to her trauma that was never processed? Do her seemingly spontaneous tears throughout the first half of the film reveal some deeper truth within herself that was never explored? All of this adds to the fascination, and the draw of this film, with Elizabeth Holmes resonating, if anything, as a character you can’t tear your eyes from.
