10/10
There’s a classic country song by the Charlie Daniels Band called “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” In the song, a young boy named Johnny gets challenged by the Devil himself to a fiddle-playing competition. Johnny, wanting the golden fiddle the Devil has promised as a reward, takes the Devil up on his challenge and, by the end of the three-minute, fiddle-heavy back-and-forth, gloriously defeats Satan himself. (“Devil, just come on back if you ever wanna try again / I done told you once, you son of a b*tch, I’m the best there’s ever been.”)
In You Can See Everything, the Devil lives in Del Mar.
Elizabeth Holmes, the now disgraced CEO of Theranos, is the woman who started this fiddle-playing competition. The former Silicon Valley starlet once claimed her company could cheaply test for thousands of diseases with just a prick of blood. The issue: Her technology didn’t work.
Now, Elizabeth (or Liz, as she insists we call her) is 34 days from an 11-year prison sentence for defrauding investors. She is living on a beach in Del Mar, California (think Maltese Falcon, not island vacation), with her cruel partner, Billy Evans, and her two children. Desperate to tell her story, she reaches out to film studio A24 with a plea: Make a documentary about me.
A24 answers that plea by sending in the best fiddle players they could find, documentarian Lance Oppenheim, and Nathan Fielder.
Fielder is just a regular guy. He graduated from one of Canada’s most prestigious business schools (and got really good grades!) before transitioning to a unique brand of deadpan, absurdist comedy. For the past decade, Fielder’s “The Rehearsal” has fooled innocent people into believing absurd things. Fielder is, in many ways, the mirror image of Holmes.
You Can See Everything, when it was surprise-announced at Telluride Film Festival in September, made waves on this premise alone. Holmes is one of America’s most famous con-women. Who better to try to understand her than Hollywood’s biggest prankster?
But what follows is far from a prank. As Fielder rummages around Holmes’ house, seeing everything, he becomes part psychologist and part philosopher. His subjects: the bewildering Holmes, the rude Evans, and the truth itself.
Holmes is a famed liar, but in many ways, so is Fielder. This seems to give him an unnerving knack for cutting through her confusion. He will play along with her scheme until the perfect moment, then deploy a question that lets the whole thing tumble down.
You get a front-row seat to this game of conversational Jenga. Thanks to Fielder, Oppenheim, and cinematographer David Bolen, Holmes and Evans are almost always frame-filling presences. The defining visual from You Can See Everything is the close-up on Holmes’ eye—blinking desperately, dubiously summoning tears. Fielder, on the other hand, knows his role. Whether he’s lurking in the background while Holmes and Evans speak privately or watching Holmes and Evans run down the beach via drone, Fielder is always aware of the image of the documentarian. He is an unabashed gossip, a voyeur, even.
The first hour and a half of the three-hour runtime is this tensely soundtracked cat-and-mouse game. As he is living in her house, Fielder’s focus seems to be the truth itself. Will anyone ever believe the words that come out of Holmes’ mouth, or will her wide-eyed, self-loathing act be able to reconvince?
“Why would I deceive you?” Holmes asks Fielder, and us, in the film’s trailer. This question should be rhetorical, but it becomes the thesis statement of the film’s first half: Why has Holmes deceived us?
Holmes’ father tells Fielder he blames her teenage rape and her implicit trust in her ex-boyfriend and co-founder Sunny Balwani. But Fielder is determined to rummage through her past to find a deeper root cause. This journey, which goes from Holmes explaining the mechanics of the faulty Theranos device to Fielder forcing Holmes to watch episodes of the Amanda Seyfried-led “The Dropout,” culminates in You Can See Everything’s most incredible scene. Fielder shows Holmes and Evans the famous Abbot and Costello “Who’s on First” routine. After she confusingly chuckles at the screen, Fielder asks her to explain the joke. It’s about miscommunication, she says. Unsatisfied, Fielder asks a follow-up: “What’s the name of the first baseman?” Holmes doesn’t know.
Of all the laughs in You Can See Everything—and there will be many—this is clearly the loudest. Holmes, Evans says, doesn’t function normally. Fielder seems confused. Maybe she’s just a psychopath.
But just as Fielder has caught his stride, the film screeches to a halt. Holmes has time to do.
What follows is a pivotal shift. The second half of the Elizabeth Holmes documentary, we now realize, won’t have Elizabeth Holmes in it. Fielder’s questions of her trustworthiness, her manipulation, her pathological misunderstanding of humanity are unanswerable. Now, it’s impossible to see anything.
The film’s second half follows Fielder as he bats heads with the souring Evans. Now, with Holmes in jail and Evans in complete control of her image, the idea of truth itself becomes Fielder’s main obsession. He asks: Is it ever possible to be truthful about a situation you are invested in? Who has the ability to manipulate truth? Is impartiality possible for a documentarian?
To answer these questions, and to retaliate against Evans’ combative character, Fielder decides to recruit an actress to bring his prison-visit conversations with Holmes to screen. I won’t spoil the surprise, but the actress who enters the film halfway through is a breath of fresh air. Always bathed in golden light, she serves as an almost angelic figure, the film’s first real human. She, unlike Holmes’ dense personality, has an airy quality, floating in and out of frame, magnetically commanding the eye. A career renaissance, and a supporting-actress Oscar nomination, should be in tow.
As Fielder and this actress parse through the repercussions of their connection to Holmes, Evans, and each other, doubt creeps in. The message seems to be turning in on itself: Is Holmes just the victim of an abusive relationship? Is she manipulating everyone, wielding her supposed powerlessness in order to gain sympathy? Are Fielder and the actress the real villains, harming Holmes’ already difficult prison life?
You can’t help but think Holmes has won. Or that Holmes, like the Devil in Georgia, was always going to win.
But in the film’s final scene, the actress’s read-through of a conversation between Fielder and the imprisoned Holmes, You Can See Everything reveals its final act of brilliance. As Fielder edits his notes of his and Holmes’ conversation, each time making Holmes seem more and more sympathetic, it is the actress’ turn to ask him a scene-toppling question. “I’m just wondering if there was, maybe, a moment when she was being deceitful or manipulative, and you’re not including it because you’re being protective of her,” she asks.
This question stops you in your tracks. Holmes, you remember, is a criminal. A master manipulator, a liar. You might be falling into her trap. But Fielder is the world’s greatest fabricator, primed to play to a camera. Have you just fallen into his?
We are left without objective truth or conclusion, only theme. Self-awareness, self-restraint, and self-examination, Fielder and Oppenheim seem to be saying, is the key to besting the fraudsters. It’s that realization, that grand song and dance, that sees Fielder victorious against his Devil. All it took was someone to play second fiddle.
“It’s complicated,” Fielder responds, with a sly smile.
Complicated is the right word for all of this.
