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The great cinematic auteur Orson Welles also practiced magic, and understood the common ground he straddled between illusionism and the movies. “Every true artist must,” he opined, “be a magician, a charlatan.” But Welles also said of world-famous escape artist Harry Houdini, “I loved Houdini, but he wasn’t an illusionist; he was a challenger. … He set up a kind of Olympic game and then won it at the end.”
It’s fitting, then, that the wildly successful documentary film following convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes of Palo Alto’s erstwhile medtech company Theranos, “You Can See Everything,” first occurred to filmmakers Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim on a visit to L.A.’s Magic Castle. After all, what is the film but an elaborate web of attempted trickery and a dual challenge, between subject and filmmaker, to a game of cat and mouse?
Holmes and her domestic and business partner Billy Evans invited A24 Films to observe their family in the month leading up to Holmes turning herself in to serve her 11-plus-year federal prison sentence for fraud. The couple agreed to let Oppenheim (director of this year’s “To Catch a Predator” dramatization “Primetime”) and Fielder (a previously TV-based comedian of ever-growing ambitions) into their home, even going so far as to invite the film crew to stay in their rented Del Mar beach house for the duration — hence, the titular promise.
Fielder accepts the offer to move in, upping the ante on an epic-length documentary that spins out from that queasily privileged month on the shore to yet murkier waters best left for viewers to navigate for themselves. What follows operates like a hall-of-mirrors tour reflecting the truths and distortions that complicate both Holmes’ persona and the nature of so-called truth-based storytelling. Can a dramatization like Hulu’s Holmes miniseries “The Dropout,” or even a documentary like “You Can See Everything” succeed in locating and transmitting truths?
Backed by Oppenheim’s cinematic heft, Fielder continues down the career path he’s been clearing for himself as the true-comedy jester behind shows like Comedy Central’s “Nathan for You” and HBO’s “The Rehearsal.” He’s a genuinely curious intellectual determined to grow out of clever pranks designed to reveal personal character and into deeper commitments, further steps taken in a search for profundities. A completely unique comedic artist, Fielder has gone from teasing a coffee giant by opening “Dumb Starbucks” stores under parody law to learning to fly a 747 airplane and influencing Congress to address mental health in aviation.
In Fielder’s least ostensibly funny work to date, he may have met his match in Holmes and Evans. An early scene establishes the untrustworthiness of the latter: Directly after insisting upon his total honesty, Fielder catches Evans in a white lie about why he takes a bowl of eggs out of Holmes’ hands.
Much greater prevarications, most of them implicating Evans, follow, but the film’s real juice is in parsing along with Fielder the couple’s oddball statements and purported perspectives, the audience becoming a jury of Holmes’ and Evans’ peers. When one makes a wildly naïve comment, say, or makes a move that could be interpreted as throwing their partner under the proverbial bus, we’re left to judge their credibility and motivations along with the filmmakers.
Extreme closeups and intense eye contact invite us to read every microexpression or lack thereof and ponder, “Could Holmes possibly believe her own denials of guilt?” Awaiting a prison sentence that will separate her from Evans and her two young children with him, Holmes has good reasons to feel emotional rawness. But she also appears to be helping along her tears in a bid for sympathy. We may be able to see everything, but how do we know what we’re looking at?
This is the game: Holmes and Evans play it in the hopes that audiences see the softer side of Holmes — a loving mother who could never do anything dastardly, at least not on purpose — while Fielder and Oppenheim presumably hope to win by letting the couple dig their own graves, laying bare their true characters (one point about Holmes is clear: she remains an expert in double speak, fluent in corporate jargon). The impossibility of achieving objective truth becomes the true subject of the documentary, much more so than the well-trodden territory of Holmes’ crimes and conviction.
The film expands over its nearly three hours to incorporate the tug-of-war of PR management that preceded the production, the all-American insistence on second-act comebacks (which Holmes pursues in an everything-old-is-new-again business venture with Evans), and the vexing impossibility of knowing what goes on inside anyone else’s mind, whether it be that of a criminal con artist, a misguided entrepreneur, the person who lays their head on the pillow beside you, or the real-life figure it’s your job to put on screen. True to form, Fielder teases the audience about the filmmakers’ inability to draw conclusions, and a susceptibility to bias through intrusive feelings of identification or affection.
Lest we forget, Fielder and Oppenheim are, like Holmes and Evans, untrustworthy magicians. Not unlike Holmes’ patented magic box, which promised scientific advancement it couldn’t deliver (and makes a cameo in this film), “You Can See Everything” winkingly promises what it can’t deliver. Although Fielder lightens the footprint of his own awkward comic persona, he leaves us to wonder what’s in his own heart, and how heavily he has put his finger on the scale to manipulate his manipulators.
“You Can See Everything”
Rated R; 2 hours, 54 minutes
Showing at theaters around the Peninsula. Visit a24films.com/films/you-can-see-everything for showtimes and more info.
