You Can See Everything

I don't think the documentary ever quite figures out what it wants to be, or why Elizabeth Holmes is an especially interesting subject.

Is it a portrait of a fraudster, an attempt to rehabilitate a misunderstood woman, or simply a record of her final days before prison? It could be all three, but the film never seems to bring these possibilities together into anything particularly compelling. It assumes her notoriety makes her inherently fascinating, yet outside of Theranos, she's a fairly unremarkable person. In her glasses and sweater on the way to prison, she could be any generic gorpcore woman.

Theranos itself feels like a hook for an otherwise rather thin portrait. The documentary doesn't seriously investigate her claims or establish much of a basis for evaluating them. By the end, we're still left wondering whether she's sincere or a master manipulator who has managed to fool even the director. But is that uncertainty a meaningful discovery, or simply the result of never having developed a way to test her account?

The director's role is equally confusing. One moment he's actively interrogating Holmes like Sherlock Holmes; the next, he's responding to questions with "I'm just listening," as though the subjects are T. rexes in Jurassic Park and, if he stays still enough, they'll forget he's there.

Neither approach is inherently wrong, but constantly switching between them changes the nature of what he's capturing. I never felt the film had a particularly coherent reason for doing so.

Then there's the cinematography, which bothered me the most. I'm not against stylized documentaries, but the elaborate compositions seem at odds with the intimacy and spontaneity the film wants to convey.

The journey to prison is a good example. With multiple cameras filming Holmes from inside and outside the car, including that perfectly composed shot of her gazing wistfully at the passing landscape, how much of her behavior is being influenced by the production itself? The shot invites us to interpret her expression as contemplation of her impending confinement, but how much of that meaning comes from Holmes, and how much is being supplied by the filmmaker?

It's like collecting samples from Mars with your bare hands. You might discover something genuinely interesting, but you've also introduced the possibility of contamination. The footage can capture real emotions while still being influenced by the circumstances of its production.

The shower scene is an even stranger example. Apparently, her husband suggested being filmed naked in the shower himself. What initially looks like extraordinary access to someone's private life is actually a moment the subject has volunteered for the camera. The willingness to expose something intimate doesn't necessarily make the resulting footage candid.

The film seems aware of these problems. It repeatedly turns the camera on its own production, showing its subjects reflecting on the documentary and questioning whether anyone is being truthful. But acknowledging that your methods might distort reality isn't the same as resolving the distortion, or even producing something insightful from it.

And that's ultimately my frustration. The documentary has extraordinary access, elaborate filmmaking, and a fascinating premise about truth and manipulation, but I don't think it makes particularly good use of them. It seems to confuse access with insight and uncertainty with profundity.

I wouldn't call it a bad film. It was interesting to watch, but it didn't live up to the hype for me. There are only so many films I'll get to see in my lifetime, and knowing what I know now, would I choose to spend that time watching this one?

Probably not.