You Can See Everything Makes a Close-Up Feel Like Evidence

Holmes invited filmmakers to document her life in the weeks before she reported to prison. The terms gave the project a clock and a remarkable amount of proximity. It could enter spaces that an ordinary interview would have had no reason to occupy. The value of that arrangement is easy to understand. There is a way people talk while sitting together for hours that they may never find in a half-hour appointment. A private habit can turn up in a frame whose original purpose was to observe something else. Oppenheim and Fielder can wait long enough for the subject’s presence to acquire a texture that publicity usually keeps out.

That openness has a condition. Holmes and her partner Billy Evans know who is in the room and have their own ideas about what the opportunity can do for them. The film is alert to the ways they can offer a new piece of access at precisely the moment the filmmakers might want a different answer. The most conspicuous example is Evans’s decision to allow the camera to accompany him through a workout and into the shower. The physical access is emphatic. It leaves him with considerable freedom over what he chooses to explain. There is a dry joke in the gap between the degree of intimacy the image can offer and the amount of knowledge it confers.

Even in the stretches that seem to go in circles, the project has a strong sense of how much time people can spend negotiating the appearance of openness. A disagreement over a word can occupy more of an encounter than the underlying question seems to warrant. It matters that Fielder is visibly engaged in those negotiations. He can set out to test a subject’s account and be drawn into protecting the arrangement that allows him to keep asking. The project’s main resource is access. Its sharpest moments let us see the filmmaker acquiring a personal stake in preserving it.

Reaction shots are an especially persuasive way of lending a witness to an image. The person answering can insist that something is perfectly clear. The person listening can look doubtful enough to make the viewer feel that the insistence has failed. Very little has to be established in dialogue. An editor has made two faces available in a useful order, and the spectator has completed an argument that may feel as though it happened entirely in the room.

That is one reason the close-ups in You Can See Everything can be both funny and strangely airless. It is easy to become skilled at the game of watching Holmes and Fielder watch each other. The picture can seem to be advancing because the spectator has discovered a different way of reading a silence. In some passages that activity produces something real. We learn how long a person is willing to leave an uncomfortable assertion hanging, or who feels obliged to repair the exchange. At other times a change in the expression of the person listening supplies the only development. The film’s almost three-hour length makes room for both experiences, sometimes in the same stretch.

TSR’s earlier essay on Primetime raised a related question about the authority an encounter can acquire from the preparation behind it. A participant’s arrival in a room can look spontaneous while the camera and the participants already know the role the arrival is supposed to play. Here the preparation is more tentative and the relationship with the subject is harder to settle. The basic advantage survives. The people assembling the encounter can decide what the audience sees immediately before an answer, how long the answer takes and what image will be available as a response. The generosity of giving somebody time and the power of making a cut can belong to the same filmmaker.

Amanda Seyfried complicates the film because she arrives with a public interpretation of Holmes already in circulation. The Dropout made her the person many viewers had in mind when thinking about how Holmes speaks, sits or makes a presentation. Bringing her into the documentary gives the audience an opportunity to see an actor work with an image she has helped establish. Once the film begins to use reenactment, familiarity becomes part of the material. A gesture can feel uncannily accurate because an earlier performance taught an audience to expect it.

The more interesting sequences also let Seyfried take a position in the filmmaking. She can raise a question about Fielder’s attachment to the people he has been watching, and her own involvement gives the question a cost. Her earlier performance has affected how some viewers believe they know the real person. Asking what the filmmakers owe Holmes also means asking what an actress may owe a person she has made recognizable to others. The film gains energy when the question becomes a disagreement between participants with different interests in the footage. A reconstruction made purely to keep the story moving would have very little of that difficulty.

There is a limit to the pleasure of discovering one more layer in the image. Holmes was convicted in a case that involved things people could verify about what had been said and done. Investors, employees and people who relied on the company’s claims have a place in that history independent of whether their experiences help make this encounter more interesting. The filmmakers are entitled to concentrate on the encounters they gained, and the result has a formal intelligence a more conventional account might never find. There are still stretches when the cleverness of the exchange grants its participants more attention than it returns in understanding.

The claim that opens the problem remains there after the film has taught us a great deal about the camera. Holmes says something that can be weighed against a record. Her manner is part of the experience of hearing it. The camera gives the manner an unusual importance by showing us how long it can hold a person in view. Fielder’s response then gives us another feeling to consider, including the relief of being allowed to share his doubt. The sequence has a stronger effect once the spectator can recognize how much of that relief belongs to the way the scene was made.

A film can do something valuable by making that susceptibility visible. Fielder and Oppenheimer are in a position to make both the intensity and the inadequacy of a look felt in the time it takes to watch one. Their best work comes in the interval when we are still interested in the face and have begun to ask what the image around it permits us to know. It is a more durable achievement than making a notorious person look unusually close.