ELIZABETH HOLMES It's okay, you can see everything

Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's film is actually not that groundbreaking

Warning: This post contains spoilers for you to see everything

We might want to believe that documentarians are neutral parties, pointing their cameras at people who are just themselves, and later turning whatever the camera captures into objective truth. But since documentaries are now made by humans and not robots, pure objectivity is impossible. When Albert and David Maysles filmed Eddie Bouvier Bill's passionate flag dance in Gray Gardens, they weren't just showing us some typical American freak in a weird headscarf. They were both afraid of him and at least somewhat laughing at him. The sequence is funny, sad, a little sad. The camera is not human, but for better or worse, the sensitivity is behind it. It may not tell us what to think, but its job is to lead us there.

Since its surprise debut at the Telluride Film Festival earlier this fall, You Can See Everything, directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, has been hailed as a groundbreaking documentary that will change the face of nonfiction filmmaking forever. Not So Fast The first half of Fielder and Oppenheim's film chronicles the 34 days leading up to the incarceration of Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the blood testing technology company Theranos. Holmes was convicted of wire fraud in 2018 and sentenced to just over 11 years in federal prison, beginning in May 2023. To make this documentary, Fielder, Oppenheim and their crew camped with Holmes, his partner Billy Evans, and their two young children and observed their lives up close - or as close as possible. The filmmakers had come at Evans' insistence: Some time before, he and Holmes, who had completely withdrawn from the public eye, had approached A24 to see if the studio might be interested in making a documentary about them. In a roundabout way, Fielder and Oppenheim became the filmmakers tasked with this task. Early in the film, we hear Evans explain that she wanted the world to get an accurate picture of the woman she knew, a devoted partner and mother, who felt unfairly mistreated. The film's title is taken from Holmes' promise to Fielder: He promised not to hide anything from the filmmakers - but did he keep that promise?

Fielder is often on screen throughout You Can See Everything, with Oppenheim working behind the scenes. Again and again, Holmes assures Fielder that he has nothing to hide, and again and again, his probing questions—if the insistence is practical—lead him into slippery half-truths. Her transparency is, in Courtney Love's words, so real it's beyond fake. This is the main pattern of the first half of the film. When Fielder isn't asking questions, he lurks backstage and listens to Evans and Holmes' conversations through a headset. When he hears something he can't believe, his eyes widen dramatically, or his eyebrows furrow, or his jaw goes slack. The puppet audience I saw the film laughed at every time. Fox kabuki humor is the new seriousness. If this is the future of documentary filmmaking—or at least the future of creative-nonfiction filmmaking—many of us will miss the late Frederick Wiseman more than we already realize.

Holmes and his evasiveness dropping everything is not the problem here. In any case, his shrill insistence on his inability to lie, or even unintentionally deceive, is at least a form of self-invented honesty. She utters lines like "All I know is my truth" before tearfully talking about her fear of being separated from her family. As the camera rolls, Holmes works overtime to convince the filmmakers and us of his innocence, while Evans regularly adds his 3,268 cents – 2 cents is never enough. (He still insists the couple have plans to start a new company, though he seems more invested in the plan than his partner.) Holmes is one of those people who talks with a smile — people who grin as the words come out of their mouths. One of his tricks is that he never breaks eye contact, and we can see him working this voodoo on the fielder. His eyes are glassy blue and clear. I have never seen such eyes, except in 19th century European horror china dolls. Do we seriously trust this woman?

We're not, and Fielder doesn't seem like he's headed that way, at least not initially. It's a dense picture - almost too much unpacking if you can be bothered to care about any of it. Holmes is charming and strangely convincing. But by design, Fielder is about as much of a player as you can see Holmes in the movie, and your feelings about the movie as a whole depend on how much you can take from him. Fielder has made a name for himself with shows like Nathan for You and The Rehearsal, in which he basically makes himself look a little silly and makes everyone else look very silly. Oppenheim, his friend and filmmaking partner, is the director of the recent Primetime nonfiction film, as well as docs like 2020's Some Kind of Heaven, which takes a wry look at the Florida retirement community known as The Villages—the ultimate in fish-in-a-barrel filmmaking. It's hard to say who's more responsible for You Can See Everything's suffocating grin, at least in the first half. The two are clearly of the same mind.

But there is one major change in the second half of the film, one that suddenly and blessedly makes it at least watchable. (If you don't want to know about this twist, stop reading here.) The second part of the film picks up two years after Holmes is incarcerated, meaning that Fielder and Oppenheim are deprived of their subject. Evans, who now looks less like a caring husband and more like an evil puppeteer eager to use his wife's words and metaphors for his own gain, severely limits their access. (His growing aura of evil is unnerving, especially when you consider that he's pretty much responsible for raising the couple's two young children.) Fielder and Oppenheim are at a loss — until they think of enlisting the help of Amanda Seyfried, who played Holmes in the 2022 miniseries The Dropout , both to defend the shamed and the offended.

As evidence emerges that Evans appears to be a great man, Fielder becomes increasingly concerned about Holmes, and his sympathies shift before our eyes: is he a victim, not just in the court of public opinion, but from the person closest to him? Seyfried seems to feel the same way, at least initially. What is clear is that she hates to see any woman under the thumb of a potentially dangerous man (or any man), and wonders aloud the possibility that Holmes, as a woman who was convinced that the company she founded could disrupt the health care system and actually help people, may have been both manipulated and misjudged. However, he is clear-eyed enough to see that Fielder may be overdoing his emotional attachment to his subject. It's this dynamic that makes the second half you can see everything click. Seyfried's presence is the film's saving grace: unlike Fielder, there's nothing calculable about her, and the second half of the film is uncomfortably engaging.

But is this really enough? You can see everything is designed to make us think hard about the relationship between a documentary maker and his subject, but anyone who has never considered this relationship before probably hasn't watched enough documentaries. The intensity of the filmmaker-subject relationship—in addition to any potential unreliability—is almost always implied, if not overt. This is true of all the films made by the great documentarians—people like Weisman, the Meisels brothers, Agnes Varda, Werner Herzog, and many others—whether they insert themselves directly into the narrative or not. You can see everything has creative touches, and no matter what happens, it's remarkable that Fielder and Oppenheim managed to keep the film under wraps for the more than three years they've been working on it. But they have not revolutionized the documentary film. They have only reinforced what distinguishes a new work from a work of genius, mere cleverness, and distance from real depth of understanding. Their film is more like a product that they brought to the market than an example of the art of the documentary maker. Do we buy or not?