‘You Can See Everything’ Review: Elizabeth Holmes, Nathan Fielder and the Limits of Truth

The title of the film announces one —perhaps several— of its central themes. The most obvious one is also the most direct. “You can see everything,” Elizabeth Holmes tells Nathan Fielder when they negotiate the kind of access the filmmaker will have during production. And that access, that proximity, is precisely what is put into question here. Fielder —who appears on camera— and Oppenheim —who does not— have access to everything that is there and everything captured by their cameras. But is that really everything? Does what gets filmed for a documentary represent the totality of what exists in a particular place and at a particular moment?

That, however, is not the main question the title raises for me. It is another one, a question that emerges in the conversations between the creator of Nathan For You, The Rehearsal and The Curse and Holmes, the woman who became famous for attempting to bring to market a revolutionary blood-testing technology that never actually worked. In their intimate conversations —often sitting just inches apart— the documentarian and his subject debate the meaning of the word “can”. For him, saying that a device “can perform any kind of test” means exactly that: it will perform those tests. For Liz, the meaning is more slippery. The fact that it can do something does not necessarily mean that it does. And that is where the difference in their respective ways of thinking becomes clear. “You can see everything” may not mean the same thing to one of them as it does to the other.

A little background may be necessary for those unfamiliar with the story leading up to this documentary. Holmes became a celebrity not so much because of her failed invention —that enigmatic machine supposedly capable of performing hundreds of complex medical tests quickly, cheaply and accurately using just a few drops of blood drawn from a fingertip— but because she raised enormous amounts of money to make it happen. At one point, when her company Theranos was valued at $9 billion, she became the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, with half of that valuation reportedly considered her personal fortune. Her image —extremely young, somewhat peculiar, with a deep voice and eyes that seemed almost never to blink— did much to turn her into a celebrity in the middle of the last decade.

But her empire collapsed when it became clear that the whole thing was an enormous fraud and that the blood tests existed only in her imagination. Or, returning to the film’s title, in the broad potential of something that “can» be done. Fielder, a comedian and creator of some very peculiar television series, realized that Holmes was perfect material for his inquisitive, simultaneously curious and eccentric approach to people and to the documentary form. She had not spoken publicly in nearly a decade and, by the time Fielder and Oppenheim began filming her, she was just 34 days away from entering prison, having been sentenced to eleven years for “conspiring to defraud investors.” This was the moment to finally obtain that elusive truth, face-to-face, up close, with complete access (24/7) to the woman in question. Would Fielder win the battle of wills?

You Can See Everything, at least during its first half, plays like a chess match, a dangerous game between the person filming and the person being filmed, between filmmaker and protagonist, between the one who looks and the one being looked at. That first section consists largely of eavesdropping on conversations, interviews and everyday observations inside the home where Holmes lives with her partner, Billy Evans, and their two children. Fielder moves in with them, sharing mundane moments in the kitchen and intimate ones in the bathroom. They all watch, somewhat awkwardly, the fictional series about Holmes, The Dropout starring Amanda Seyfried, and discuss the mechanics of the documentary itself as the days go by and the date of Holmes’s imprisonment approaches.

The film thus becomes a kind of dialectical duel, one that reveals the differences between them —the moment when they analyze a famous Abbott & Costello sketch is particularly telling— but also their similarities. Fielder and Holmes have both learned how to construct public personas that refuse to crack, maintaining their positions no matter what. Fielder does it through his comic alter ego, a character who is almost always seen looking serious, slightly uncomfortable and operating within an extremely thin margin between “Is he for real?” and “Is he pretending?” In her own way, Holmes is much the same. She insists that she is exactly what she appears to be: honest and straightforward, with nothing to hide. She claims never to have lied in her entire life —“not even a white lie,” she says— and maintains that everything she did, she did in good faith. Is she lying or telling the truth? Does she believe what she says, or has she swallowed the character whole?

The film’s style is closer to Oppenheim’s than to Fielder’s, largely because the director of Some Kind of Heaven and Spermworld specializes in formally stylized, enigmatic documentaries in which settings and characters are presented in a way that feels closer to fiction than to what we traditionally expect from nonfiction. The music, the editing, the lenses, the close-ups, the silences: everything contributes to giving You Can See Everything an almost supernatural quality, like a suspense film in which it is never entirely clear what is real and what is not, or how so many elements of fiction can coexist within a film that ostensibly occupies the territory of documentary. Fielder also operates in an extravagant realm (just watch the ending of The Curse, or some of the more twisted moments in The Rehearsal, and you’ll see what I mean), and here, for once, he seems to have found an opponent perfectly matched to him.

The first half of the film unfolds as an argument about the boundaries between truth and falsehood, reality and fiction, while weaving in details of the relationship between Holmes and Fielder and, above all, the tensions that gradually emerge between Evans and the filmmaking team for reasons you’ll discover when you see the movie. Holmes’s imprisonment marks the end of one stage, and two years later another one begins, as Fielder’s familiar metafictional mechanisms enter the picture. Without pushing things to the stratospheric extremes of his most recent series, the filmmaker/comedian nonetheless comes up with an ingenious gambit for continuing to “tell” Holmes’s story even when he can no longer have access to Holmes herself, since cameras are not allowed inside the prison. Evans, meanwhile, becomes a character almost as important as his partner, a man every bit as slippery as she is, perhaps even more so, but in a way that is considerably easier to see.

That gambit recalls the cinema of Charlie Kaufman (those who have seen Synecdoche, New York will know what I mean) in its attempt to capture truth through artifice, and it opens the film up to comparisons with other documentaries that deliberately complicate their relationship with reality, such as Orson Welles’s F for Fake, Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (not to be confused with Oppenheim), or Robert Greene’s Kate Plays Christine, to name just a few. Fielder and Oppenheim blow up the notion of the conventional documentary and ask whether fiction might actually be the best route toward a truth that cannot necessarily be captured simply because one “can see everything.”

One of the main themes of this second half is the ethics —or lack thereof— behind a documentary of this kind. Money becomes part of the equation (should the “characters” in a film like this be paid?), as do questions about how the information gathered is handled and, above all, what lines the filmmakers should not cross. In other words, when does intimacy become excessive, to the point where it compromises a filmmaker’s impartiality? You Can See Everything devotes considerable attention —perhaps too much, in my view, and at the expense of the film’s pacing— to certain financial negotiations that not everyone involved may even be aware of. But the most significant aspect of this section has more to do with the way Fielder and another person who joins him in this part of the film, whose identity I won’t reveal here, begin to venture into increasingly dangerous territory when it comes to the boundaries of their relationship with Holmes.

There are two key moments in the film’s 174 minutes that reinforce this almost philosophical idea about the impossibility of reaching a deeper truth than the one that can be filmed. In more than one scene, Holmes and Fielder argue over something she supposedly said in a New York Times interview. The article reported that Holmes had spoken to the journalist about “the character I created,” referring to herself. But Holmes denies saying that. She believes she was talking about “the character they created,” referring to the people who knew her. That person the public thinks it knows, Holmes argues, does not necessarily have anything to do with the real person. There she is, sitting through the interrogations, allowing tears to roll down her cheeks, displaying all her humanity. Or something that looks very much like it.

In another sequence, Holmes is asked to pose for a 3D scan of her face and body before going to prison, with the goal of creating a kind of artificial-intelligence avatar that can “continue” her life digitally. With Holmes removed from the world during her sentence, the technology could allow her —and, more importantly, her partner to keep her “alive,” both for commercial and emotional purposes. The possibility is as real as it is chilling. And it brings the film back to the question posed by its title. You Can See Everything is ultimately less interested in what a camera can capture than in what remains beyond its reach. The more Fielder and Oppenheim see, the more elusive that person becomes. Perhaps that is the film’s most unsettling idea: that seeing everything may not be the opposite of seeing nothing, but another way of discovering how much remains invisible.