Photo: A24/Everett Collection
There are a bunch of scenes from You can see everything that I’ve been turning over and over in my head like river stones since I saw it at the New York Film Festival on Wednesday night. But there’s one in particular that I keep coming back to, which dates from the first third of the documentary, which lasts just under three hours and which captures every mind-boggling minute. Nathan Fielder, who had access to Elizabeth Holmes and her family in the five weeks before his prison sentence began in May 2023, sits down with Theranos founder and her husband, Billy Evans, to show them what he describes as probably the most famous comedy routine of all time. Both men say they don’t know Abbott and Costello, and that “Who’s on first?” goes on television, Fielder watches Holmes watch the piece for what is apparently the first time. She wears the same smug smile that seems to be the standard expression on her face when she shakes her youngest child, then a baby. “Do you understand why this is funny?” he then asks, while she claims to have enjoyed the video. “They were talking to each other,” she replies. But when he asks the disgraced tech mogul the first baseman’s name — the key to the premise of the long-running joke — she can’t answer him. She insists she didn’t catch it.
There might not seem to be much to say about Holmes at this point, after his well-documented downfall spawned an entire mini-industry of content, from books to podcasts to Sundance films to Hulu’s scripted miniseries. The dropout. But there were times You can see everythingwhen she turns her unblinking, overly wide gaze toward Fielder, during which I was tempted to think she’s one of the greatest doc subjects of all time. She is a deeply strange and elusive object of interest, although what makes the film so astonishing, a metanarrative mille-feuille about all the ways we try to evaluate truth, is how Holmes’s monster contrasts with Fielder’s, and how Prime time wunderkind Lance Oppenheim, with whom Fielder shares a co-director credit, shapes the project into something astonishingly cinematic. Holmes insists, with a dazed naivety whose authenticity is impossible to judge, that not only does she not understand how she got into trouble, but that she has never lied in her life. Fielder, meanwhile, brings his characteristic awkwardness and well-established tendency to blur the lines between the interpreted and the real. It’s like they were made for each other.
You can see everythingwhich will be released in theaters on A24 on October 16, is essentially fueled by duels of neurodivergences. This becomes explicit every time Evans, who engineered the documentary’s existence, appears front and center. A standard tech bro who loves working out and watching microbiology videos at 2x speed, he loves talking about how his wife “thinks differently” and how he wanted Fielder’s involvement because he seemed like someone who thought “outside the box.” What he means by that changes alarmingly as the film progresses, especially after Holmes leaves to begin serving what was initially an 11-year sentence at a minimum-security prison in Bryan, Texas (although news broke last week that she had been approved for a transfer to a halfway house in 2027). The first hour of the film, which is also its funniest, takes place at the Del Mar beachfront cottage complex, where Holmes, Evans, and their two children hole up for a final concentrated period of family time, with Fielder observing and asking questions throughout, lurking in the background like a sleep-paralyzed demon. It’s a surreal and terribly intimate window in which to try to get interviews, but Fielder is determined, and Holmes swears everything is on the table even as Evans tries to shape the proceedings.
Is the intrusiveness of the film crew the important point for Holmes, in the sense that it allows him to use the limited time he has left with his loved ones as a shield and tool? It’s impossible to say, and it’s increasingly clear that she and her husband have different, potentially conflicting, goals as their motivations for participating in the project. In the discussions he has with Holmes in this first act, Fielder looks at her like someone trying to figure out whether the player on the other side of the table in a poker game is bluffing. The empty out-of-season seaside and blowing light add to the dreamlike atmosphere, the sense of unreality that runs throughout the film and morphs as it moves to Texas, where Evans becomes the focus while Holmes is behind bars, and then into an incredible third act that I don’t want to spoil, except to say that it manages to be equal parts Errol Morris and Vertigo. You can see everything is a film about the motivations and ethics of documentary filmmaking, about what it means to label something nonfiction even when it’s edited and crafted and the camera can’t capture everything. It’s about performance, raising the question of whether the Holmes we see isn’t simply the latest character of a woman who’s transformed herself into a scribble of a tech iconoclast to convince backers, and then asking even more clearly what it means for her public perception to be dictated by the media about her.
But it’s also, more deeply, about how we decide whether we really know what’s going on in another person’s head and heart, where the manipulation stops and the investment begins. Fielder, listening to the audio in his headphones and curling up at night on a bare mattress in the guest bedroom of this Del Mar rental, begins to resemble a character engaged in a doomed but noble quest. Holmes tells him that she sees the film as a human story, as if by simply showing herself in her entirety she can convince the world to finally be on her side. But in You can see everythingthe closer we get to it, the less knowable it becomes – a set of pointillist dots in the shape of a person.
Show all
Gn entert
