You Can See Everything begins with access that sounds almost too valuable to question. Elizabeth Holmes is approaching the start of a prison sentence and invites filmmakers into the life she still has outside. The time available gives the project an immediate shape. Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim are interested in how quickly that shape becomes an offer to believe something. A person can place an extraordinary amount of her ordinary life in view and still be working to determine what the view will mean. The documentary is most arresting when the directors discover that they have made the same offer to the audience.
Holmes has been played and interpreted often enough that a small domestic movement can arrive with an unusually crowded history. The film can see her with her partner Billy Evans and observe a routine that would seem private in another context. That observation has a value independent of whether it gives the audience an answer about her personality. The early passages are compelling because the prospect of prison can give a mundane decision a deadline without explaining whether the filmmakers understand the decision any better for having been allowed to see it.
The repeated close-ups are an especially good way to show how much access can resemble a claim of certainty. A person is visible to a degree that would be embarrassing in ordinary conversation. The size of the face encourages the spectator to use small movements as if they were reliable evidence. Fielder and Oppenheim can then leave the audience with the work of considering how little it knows about the conditions in which those movements occurred. A cut can give one expression the status of an answer when the camera has recorded considerably less than that.
The intervention of performers including Amanda Seyfried and Christopher Abbott makes the status of access harder to take for granted. Seyfried has already played Holmes in The Dropout. The new film can use the audience’s memory of that earlier imitation as material, along with the differences between what a performer can make available and what a documentary subject might choose to reveal. Fielder has spent much of his work demonstrating that a reconstruction can be accurate about one person’s expectations and wildly inaccurate about everybody else’s. Here the technique has force because another person in the room is equally attentive to the advantages of an arrangement.
It is easy to see why the directors want a long running time. A small confusion about a particular image would make a clever device. Hours of moving between kinds of footage can change an audience’s habits of attention. The length also presents a risk. There are times when the machinery makes the encounter more absorbing than Holmes herself and times when it seems to require her to be interesting in a way the camera has yet to establish. The film is at its sharpest when it allows that possibility to become a cost the directors themselves have to acknowledge in the work.
The experiment is at its most persuasive when the reconstructions keep their own seams. A performer can render a beat more intelligible and in the process make the behavior on either side of it harder to recognize. An encounter that seemed resistant to a dramatic account can start to look like something the filmmakers have already mastered. The presence of Seyfried makes the seduction particularly easy to understand. We have an unusually prepared viewer’s idea of what she might do with Holmes before we see it. The difference between satisfaction and evidence is consequently felt in the pleasure of the casting itself.
The question of who benefits from all this attention remains difficult. Holmes can gain a great deal of space for her account even if the account remains open to doubt. The directors can make a considerable spectacle of their skepticism. The story of Theranos includes people who had to make decisions based on information they had reason to believe. Their predicament gives the games with evidence a consequence beyond the pleasure of detecting another level of construction. The film’s most useful unease comes from letting access feel at once like an opportunity, an obligation and a product somebody will be able to sell.
