Elizabeth Holmes is always being real with us. Despite being indicted for large-scale fraud, she beams with a glassy-eyed, arch-eyebrowed, frozen-in-place smile. She speaks with almost exaggerated softness. Sometimes a solitary tear slices down her cheek. Her perpetually serene, pasted-on grin evokes the horror film “Smile:” if she stops smiling, it seems, something could go horrifically wrong.
Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s unconventional documentary traces the life of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes from the thirty-four days before her entry to federal prison through the following two years. The lewdly grandiose premise: you can see everything. Accordingly, the audience gets a front row seat to the everyday rhythms of her and her partner’s domestic life. We see the inside (never the outside) of their house, a temporary dwelling. It is reminiscent of a stage set, with its wooden beams, the omnipresence of the idyllic beach outside, the blurred pictures on the fridge. Oppenheim and Fielder’s production zooms in on closed doors—you can hear the couple talking through walls, running at the beach, cooking breakfast. We get to know their routines: Elizabeth Holmes cradles her children, reads to them, tries and fails to scramble eggs. In fact, you can literally see everything: the documentary features a full frontal nude shot of Billy Evans, Holmes’ partner, who allegedly requested to be filmed in the shower. Underneath it all, though, runs a feeling that something is deeply wrong; we are clearly being deceived. Fielder’s documentary spends its three-hour runtime expertly blurring the lines between character and actor, lies and truth. By the end of it all, we emerge highly suspicious that every person in the documentary—even Fielder himself—is playing a role of their own making.
Elizabeth Holmes answers Fielder’s deep, probing questions with a smile. Up front, a skeptical Fielder lets her know he is convinced by the evidence against her. Although her eyes well up, her familiar smile sticks. “I understand what people think about me…all I know is my truth”, she says, with a voice that cracks slightly and eyes that seem to alternate strangely between deep sadness and tranquility. Sitting on the couch in her family living room, her vulnerability creates a certain tension between the two. Fielder is forced to console her: “that must be hard.” He hands her a tissue.
Elizabeth Holmes tries so hard to be a normal person that you sometimes forget she’s not an actor. “It took me a really long time to be okay with letting someone see me cry…but I don’t really know if that’s true,” she admits. She does seem uncomfortable. She is tense, and her lines are perfectly calibrated to evoke vulnerability and sympathy. But her smile stretches too wide and lingers too long. She seems to almost imperceptibly shake her head as she speaks, as if some intrinsic force of conscience unintentionally pulls back on her words. Her performance, if not lacking in sincerity, misses something human. Amidst all the TV shows and scandals, Billy Evans laments that “Ms. Holmes, the person, got lost.” This documentary seems to ask us: was she ever there?
Somehow, famously eccentric comedian Nathan Fielder manages to be one of the less awkward characters in the film. He accomplishes this miraculous feat simply by letting his subjects talk. Holmes famously asks him “Why would I deceive you?” with an uncanny, deceptive smile. The ironic humor writes itself.
The film is most successful through its subtle comedy. Fielder, to his credit, plays a role in drawing out the humor; the camera lingers on her still-smiling face for a while after this. He gives us extra time to study Holmes’s canned facial expressions; to think, really? He also seems to enjoy puncturing Holmes’ exaggeratedly sincere attitude with untimely jokes. He buys her a gag disguise gift “in case she wants to skip town” before she goes to jail. Neither she nor her parents laugh.
Later in the film, actress Amanda Seyfried, who played Holmes in The Dropout—and plays an incarcerated Holmes in this documentary—visits Billy Evans. Seyfried asks Holmes over the phone if she knew she was visiting. Holmes (who despises The Dropout) replies, “I don’t know if I knew.” The couple’s desperate attempts to convince the viewer that we are deluded about them are constantly undermined by the fact that they inhabit a world of counterintuitive logic. The couple invited Fielder and Oppenheim into their home to redeem themselves in the public eye, but they never seem to realize that they are the butt of the joke.
If the pair is as deceptive as the fraud charges imply, Holmes is the better actress of the two. Compared to Evans’ unstable, panicked, borderline-narcissistic raging, her calm, assured, glassy-eyed stare sometimes makes her seem more victim than fraudster. She cradles her children, and goes to them when they’re crying in bed; in those moments, she seems real. Over the course of the documentary, Fielder himself increasingly reels into confusion, unable to tell whether Holmes is deceiving them. And as soon as she goes to jail, Fielder slowly peels back the terror of a controlling relationship before the viewer’s eyes.
It is hard to believe that Billy Evans is feigning his villainous tendencies. Holmes and Evans spend the documentary proclaiming their innocence, but within this lies a quiet underlying anger, a resentment, that their place in society has been stripped away. Holmes seems to repress it behind her emotionless smile. With Evans, an MIT grad and the son of a wealthy hotel mogul, the entitlement bursts forth more often. The rage is familiar to anyone who’s experienced something like it. Evans yells at Amanda Seyfried over her anti-Charlie Kirk stance, declaring himself to be “better read than you.” He angrily mutters at her, threatening those involved in The Dropout, “I’m going to ruin their lives…fucking everyone…I’m fucking good at it.” Even as he claims to be a victim of injustice, he makes sure we remember the power he holds to perpetuate harm. Perhaps too briefly, the documentary satirizes his desire for victimhood.
The initial cheerful images of romantic life crumble, metamorphosed into a parody of conjugal bliss. Evans uses Homes’ image rampantly without her knowledge, makes abrasive tweets in her name, negotiates deals on her behalf when she’s not in the room. He makes ridiculous statements to Fielder in earnest tones: “I think Liz would tell you if she is here…what she will be remembered for is our relationship.” That’s comically improbable. Not her deranged smile, or her crumble from a net worth of $4.5 billion to $0, or her four counts of wire fraud and conspiracy, Fielder might’ve wondered. No, Nathan: just Billy and his passion for Charlie Kirk.
Could this woman so thoroughly subject to the whims of her partner, who still foolishly clings to the idea of her company coming back to life—could she be the same woman who cruelly and cunningly defrauded millions of dollars from investors? I think yes; Holmes could well be playing the part of the victimized woman to seem sympathetic. But is she actually acting?
It’s like a good murder mystery: viewers are left with just enough faith in their interpretive abilities to know deception is happening, but not enough to stop being strung along guessing the who and the how. Is Elizabeth Holmes merely a perpetrator—or also a victim herself? Has she become so deluded that she no longer understands reality? Can she admit to herself that she is guilty? How much of Elizabeth Holmes is real, and how much of her is a character she is acting out for the screen?
Ultimately, the documentary does what Holmes never could: it acknowledges its own nature as manufactured. It proclaims to us that “You Can See Everything,” but strips itself back to reveal the paradoxical, exaggerated nature of this statement. Backstage, we see Nathan Fielder grapple with his attachment to Holmes. We see a meeting about royalties from the film. The camera cuts from Amanda Seyfried’s personal incredulity over the situation, to her playing a fictionalized Holmes in The Dropout, to her reenacting Fielder’s conversations as an incarcerated Holmes.
Even still, we are left with the unsettling feeling that everything is an act. The film could be a projection of Nathan Fielder’s consciousness, cobbled together from frames that could’ve otherwise wound up as discarded cut scenes. Amanda Seyfried’s remarks might have been directed by A24, even when she wasn’t playing the role of Holmes. I left the movie feeling unsettled, unsure where to draw the line between acting and reality. And I knew, for a fact, I had not seen everything. That’s what was so compelling about it.
At the end of the documentary, Seyfried accuses Fielder of changing his script to position Holmes in a more positive light. He takes time to think, blinks, lingers. “I’m not really putting my feelings into this…I’m just trying to be accurate.” The camera lingers on his pensive expression.
Then, suddenly, the documentary immerses us in the same light blue waves as the beginning—except now there’s someone else in the water. At first it looks like Holmes and Evans roughhousing on the beach. We assume Nathan Fielder sits gingerly on the side; he told us earlier he did not like cold water swimming.
But then the camera zooms in. Fast-paced piano tones play in the minor key. We see it is not Evans, but Fielder playing with Holmes in the water. They are talking and laughing. For a second it seems as though she grabs his arm.
Is Fielder in the thrall of Elizabeth Holmes? Is he curating his actions to make her appear more sympathetic? Is he cutting scenes, axing evidence of his own biases, feigning his skepticism from the beginning? Does he love her? Or is he merely—as always, as the director, as the man who decides what the camera shows, as the man who decides what disappears—playing a more compelling character.
