I’m awestruck by Conrad Flynn’s review of Nathan Fielder’s movie about Elizabeth Holmes: You Can See Everything:
FILM REVIEW: ‘You Can See Everything’
A Millennial skeptic and a Zoomer mystic usher in the era of “Elevated Reality TV”
Conrad Flynn
There’s a classic Jack Handey joke that goes:
“Broken promises don’t upset me. I just think, why did they believe me?”
And I thought about that joke a few times after Nathan Fielder/Lance Oppenheim’s You Can See Everything. If you dumbed down that Handey “Deep Thoughts” line to something like, “It’s strange how people think a movie is truthful when it’s called a ‘documentary,’” you’ve got something close to the joke and spirit of their film.
That being said, You Can See Everything is a really entertaining movie.
It’s extremely well made, but also a bit of a nothingburger. It’s kind of a machine for boring viewers into conjuring up Deep Thoughts about what it must actually be about.
It’s just not as deep as people want it to be (thankfully).
Distributed by A24, which had a reputation for excelling in a pseudogenre called “elevated horror” (the horror movie equivalent of earlier genres coined by marketing teams such as “prestige TV” and “art rock”) You Can See Everything might have just popularized a new category of movie we might someday call “Elevated Reality TV” or “Reality Cinema.”
Remodeling a trashy Hollywood genre with Criterion Collection visual aesthetics is admittedly funny, and does well with hipster-comedy audiences. …
Everything stars Nathan Fielder as he begins a straightforward documentary (scare quotes I leave to reader discretion throughout this post) about soon-to-be-imprisoned Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes, who (along with her fiancée Billy Evans, who is the father of her young children) wanted A24 to make a movie about her before she goes to jail for wire fraud. (Among Theranos’ indirect crimes, which the movie doesn’t disclose, was also giving people false cancer diagnoses and triggering the suicide of a Theranos scientist who would’ve had to have either lied under oath or ruined the company.)
The story is that Fielder and Oppenheim heard a rumor while together at the Magic Castle
The Hollywood home for magicians and other illusionists.
that Holmes wanted an A24 doc to reveal “the real” version of herself,
The real version of Elizabeth Holmes is exactly what you can assume from reading John Carreyrou’s 2018 bestseller Bad Blood.
and the two men then acted quickly to secure the directing job (though Holmes should’ve known she’d be spoofed if Fielder was involved creatively). That backstory, like so much of the film, is intentionally murky. …
I’d love to know what documentary purists make of some of the film’s techniques, as the movie strikes me as openly dishonest about its methods (a friend half-joked it is closer to The Hills or Laguna Beach than to a Frederick Wiseman doc), but it’s all the more entertaining for taking liberties and being evasive.
The bottom line is that Fielder and Oppenheim had the opportunity to make a cinematic reality-television film with one of the biggest scammers of our generation (if financial scale and the power of the men she deceived is the metric), and they made a truly memorable movie with it.
Ultimately, it’s just funny to watch the filmmakers mess with Holmes and her fiancée, then make a meta-movie with the actress who already satirized Holmes in a comedy, and then show the two women the footage of the other one,
Amanda Seyfried, who has similar big blue eyes, is a really good movie starlet who just hasn’t quite been in a good movie since Mean Girls 22 years ago. She has been outstanding in prestigious productions like playing William Randolph Hearst’s mistress Marion Davies in David Fincher’s biopic Mank about the screenwriter of Citizen Kane, but the rest of the production didn’t live up to her performance.
This will likely be her most famous role.
and it’s also amusing to watch Holmes and Billy’s ultimately failed attempts to manipulate Nathan Fielder and A24.
Ostensibly, the theme of You Can See Everything is Fielder philosophizing about “What is ‘truth?’ Can a ‘documentary’ really be ‘true’?”
But when Holmes’s boyfriend Billy demands to be paid to let A24’s camera crew invade his home during his last 34 days with his (more or less) wife and the mother of his two children, Fielder suddenly switches to epistemological absolutism: Paying you for your participation would compromise the integrity of this documentary. This is a documentary movie!
But then A24 and Fielder decide to pay Billy (but not Elizabeth, who owes hundreds of millions in restitution that she’d have to cough up to Rupert Murdoch et al). But over the course of making the movie, they bully Billy into foregoing his money.
With Fielder and Holmes as essentially the two leads, the film also ends up contrasting two Millennial archetypes that first clashed online at the end of the 2000s: the dark-humored male nerd (Fielder) sensibility that was handed down from the ironic Gen X-era internet, and the ruthlessly ambitious yet cloyingly earnest “This is my personal brand. There are many like it, but this one is mine”
Millennial con-trepreneur shtick that would do well in the pivot-to-video age of Obama and “Hope & Change.”
So we have, in Fielder, spiritually the cleverest SomethingAwful poster of all time, outmaneuvering Holmes, the ultimate TED Talk-core inspirational CEO or NGO-head Millennials had to hear speak platitudes on their college campuses when the iPhones first came out.
It’s a silent online culture war from 2009 finally going hot.
Lots of the smart white male bloggers from the first decade of this millennium are highly amused by Fielder taking down the kind of woman who dominated the second decade of this century.
But they aren’t allowed to mention that.
… Not since Sasha Baron Cohen in the 2000s and Louis C.K. in the 2010s have we had a comedian who was this popular and critically revered. Given what happened to those two comics, I’m a bit worried that Nathan will have some terrible fall from grace or fall hard out of fashion.
But if he does, he’ll only need to consult with Nathan Fielder to come up with the perfect marketing scheme to bring about his own comeback. …
Buzzfeed would take pictures like this and write …
Paywall here.
