The sneaky problem with the Elizabeth Holmes movie, you can see it all

More than 100 years ago, a filmmaker made the first documentary. Since then, controversy has followed form.

Northern NanookRobert Flaherty’s Inuit Truth redefined the way we imagine cinema in 1922, but critics in subsequent decades accused him of staging scenes, creating sensationalism and replacing actors with real people.

In the 1980s, Errol Morris shook up the world of documentation with The thin blue linehis re-examination of a Texas murder case from a decade earlier. Morris questioned the incident so convincingly that it led to an overturned conviction – but sparked a whole new investigation into why he re-enacted scenes. Two decades later, Michael Moore dropped the grenade Fahrenheit 9/11. The look at George W. Bush’s foreign policy sins brought millions of Americans to the movies, but generated heat around what Moore exaggerated or left out.

Yet something seems different with this decade’s documentary sensation, which not only plays fast and loose with the truth, but also plays fast and loose with the truth while making the truth the very subject of its investigation. The Elizabeth Holmes Observation Paper by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim You can see everythingostensibly about the lies of Holmes and her husband Billy Evans, has already solicited the kind of box office dollars more familiar to low-budget thrillers, becoming the non-fiction film world’s hottest pop-cultural phenomenon since a posthumous Michael Jackson rehearsal documentary in 2009. Like its forebears, YCSE leaves room for questions about manipulation, starting with the fact that two camera setups followed each supposedly unconscious reaction, and the fact that Holmes started the project, perhaps with crisis PR specialist Risa Heller, who helped arrange a soft-spoken interview in The New York Times around the same time. I suspect the coming months will bring more such objections.

But this time, the skepticism goes beyond fears of selective editing and selective editing. The whole YCSE The project is built by people who specialize in presenting lies as truth, with each layer composed by someone whose very hallmark is deception, like a saucy cinematic lasagna.

Holmes spent years fooling presidents into believing the reality she created, and with that in mind, how many of her statements can be considered honest? For example, did she really not understand “Who’s on first?” » or what was Fielder getting at by challenging her on what Theranos machine couldn’t actually do? Or just find it convenient if we found ourselves believing she hadn’t done it? For his part, Fielder has made his living turning fiction into truth – a season finale of his HBO show. The repetition tragically convinced a child that he was the boy’s own father – and his involvement here can only cast a pall of expectation over the exercise. What we see, what we don’t see, how the details were shaded to make everyone, including him, seem like something they maybe weren’t.

Even the person considered most authentic—Amanda Seyfried, the audience’s surrogate in whose hands we unthinkingly place our trust—is a talented performance magician who, unlike her previous screen appearances, did not introduce writers to William Randolph Hearst, be raised by Jean Valjean, or hold a competition to determine her real father on a Greek island. Yet somehow we assume that she and all her fellow conjurer masters are here to tell us what really happened. I mean, it’s a documentary; why would they do otherwise?

Fielder and Oppenheim made the truth the subject of their documentary – “you can see it all,” the title promises – and then proceeded to cut away at every moment. It’s a testament to their power as filmmakers that we come away feeling confident enough that we’ve figured out what Holmes is trying to do to Fielder while often remaining oblivious to what Fielder has just done to us. As veteran journalist and commentator Matt Pearce recently wrote on Substack: “I’m just trying to be accurate,” Fielder says near the end of his film, lying through his fucking teeth. »

That’s not to say the film isn’t great fun, full of pleasant surprises and, ultimately, a compelling meditation on reality and credulity. It also doesn’t mean we aren’t the target.

On some level, maybe none of this matters. Why dwell on what’s “real” when it’s all such a good time in the theater? However, the brutal force of the film comes precisely from this documentary categorization; completely invent exactly the same film and YCSE loses a lot of its power. The fact that it’s real is why it’s shocking. But even more important than what the documentary does for Fielder is what Fielder does for or for the documentary. Such good timing risks transforming the category, currently our most important investigative medium, into yet another boring vehicle for the postmodern nod, a perhaps not great development in an ecosystem where shared facts are already running out of steam.

Against such a backdrop, other quick and vague criticisms have been leveled at the docs this season: Alex Gibney’s decision to create and deploy a speaking avatar of Elon Musk using his own words in Muskor the deployment of AI by Ava DuVernay to bring archive photos to life in The 14th – look like peccadilloes. And yet, they all fit into the same set of questions. The documentary entered into a dual assessment, both technologically in this age of deepfake, given how easily something can appear real, and ethically, given how much harder it can be, in the age of echo chamber truth, to know what “real” is in the first place.

In this quagmire, another irony: a film that is largely scripted but can paint a truer picture. Ali G has lost something of his fastball since he and the vanishing Sacha Baron Cohen in him gleefully confronted public leaders on HBO twenty years ago with his convicted stupidity, revealing what lies behind the politeness of an ATF officer, a surgeon general, and Donald Trump.

And yet, at his best, Baron Cohen, in his new film, still achieves all the spiritual goals of the season’s great documentary, but without hiding behind the protective shield of that word. Ali G: Who am I? arrives at the same place as YSCE just the other way, seeking to tell us the truth about a full spectrum of social activists and cancel warriors not from a pseudo-truth camera capture but from a carefully written and directed screen contrivance, reprising the lab experiment that Baron Cohen began in the 2018 Showtime series. Who is America? Perhaps it’s no surprise that Nathan Fielder, who worked with and learned from him on that show nearly a decade ago, understood both the combustible power of unmasking stupidity on screen and how much more explosive the chemical reaction would be if you just pretended it was all real.

Every era gets the brand of documentary it deserves. In an age of widespread misinformation and relentless conspiracy theories, where no one believes anything they (or their algorithm) hasn’t created and everyone resists attempts by others to try to change their minds, where everyone speaks their own “truth” and where decades of relativism have transformed objective facts into hilarious fiction, YCSE is, for better or worse, our most iconic work.

The film opens a new window, certainly, not on Holmes but on us, staggering among the postmodern wrecks like an abandoned sailor who still has not accepted the fact that his ship is missing. You can see everything is a fascinating snapshot of our social state. I’m just not sure it’s a documentary.

This story appeared in the November 12 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.