What is the truth? How much of the drama of our lives is because we are all just the lead actors in a play of our own making? How much of the drama in our lives is from simple misunderstandings and incorrect perceptions vs. manipulation and deception? How much of our stress is from the increasing artificiality being forced on us against our will?
These questions and more are explored across the nearly three hour runtime of You Can See Everything, a both wildly intimate and mysteriously distant depiction of the final 34 days of Elizabeth Holmes’ freedom and the dark psychological impacts that stretch even further beyond.
Lance Oppenheim co-directs this with Nathan Fielder. Fielder, as per his now well-known brand from his series The Rehearsal, breaks the fourth wall in “cringe comedy” style by becoming an awkward active participant in what he documents. Oppenheim presents Fielder both as the Nathan many know and the weird voyeur we’ve always thought he might be, and it’s fascinating to watch Fielder, for maybe the first time, break character and get actively flustered by the duplicitous answers given by Holmes and her partner, Billy.
The film is presented in a combination of dialogues, extreme closeups (that bring to mind Dreyer’s work on The Passion of Joan of Arc) and awkward moments, complete with a transfixing minimalist Bernard Herrmann-lite music score from Ari Balouzian.
It makes for a sensational documentary for the first half of the film until Holmes is sent to prison. Now suddenly, Oppenheim and Fielder are without their leading lady, leading to one of the most well-executed POV pivots this side of Hitchcock’s Psycho.
SPOILERS AHEAD – STOP HERE IF YOU HAVE NOT YET SEEN THE FILM AND THEN COME BACK ONCE YOU HAVE
Early in the film, Fielder awkwardly convinces Holmes and her partner, Billy, to watch with him the acclaimed Hulu drama, The Dropout, which earned Amanda Seyfried an Emmy for her portrayal of Holmes, and we witness Holmes have an emotional reaction that caused them to cut the viewing party short.
Later, with Holmes in prison, Fielder, in full-on Rehearsal-in-reverse mode, turns to none other than Amanda Seyfried to help dissect some of his footage and partake in his meticulous recreations of events that happened off camera including early discussions leading up to the filming, and prison conversations that could not be recorded.
Seyfried dives into the assignment with the wanton abandon of both an actress who can’t let go of a great role and an amateur detective trying to get at the truth. She makes for a dynamic duo with Fielder – they go as far as visiting Billy and the kids together – and their chemistry is off the charts. Ironically, Seyfried is the one person seemingly playing her true self, and we get to see many sides of her: the consummate actress, the ride-or-die friend, the ever-inquisitive mind, the animal lover, and the social activist. Her uncensored facial reactions and verbal outbursts as Fielder delivers the dish on Holmes and Billy emerge as if she is reading our minds, and as such she also serves as the proxy for the audience.
Meanwhile, Billy emerges as a villain – a mediocre, angry man with an unearned confidence, born with a silver spoon (and forked tongue) in his mouth and lucky enough to have entered Holme’s orbit. Earlier, to show how much access was given, he is filmed in the shower leaving nothing to the imagination. But later, reptiles are seen slithering and skittering about their new home in Austin, TX near the federal prison, thus illuminating another reason for showing us a part of him that is often euphemistically called a snake. He’s been the “snake in the grass” the whole time.
With Seyfried as Holmes, Seyfried as Seyfried, Fielder as Fielder, and Billy as a snake, the film reaches an astounding new level.
The result is nothing short of a masterpiece, and a sure-fire contender for the top ten of the decade.
You Can See Everything is a brilliant mirror to our uniquely perilous time, where the once vaulted titans of Silicon Valley have shed their human skin revealing their reptilian nature, willing to commodify the ever-increasing artificiality and blurring of reality and fiction without any regard toward the human cost. Holmes emerges as both a perpetrator and victim, and in her Möbius strip of a story, Fielder and Oppenheim have found a most complex and still unresolved subject. Meanwhile speaking for not just herself but also for us, both enraptured and enraged by the absurdity, Seyfried is given the role of a lifetime as herself observing and participating in…all of this.
