Movie Review: You Can See Everything
Full spoilers follow.
I do kind of wonder how this movie reads to someone who hasn’t seen Nathan Fielder’s previous work, or to someone who isn’t familiar with either The Dropout (2022) or the crimes of Elizabeth Holmes. I watched this movie on a Thursday night, and it was showing in four of the ten screens at my theater, all of them at capacity. This was astounding to me, given that this is the treatment a blockbuster gets, and to me, Nathan Fielder is a weird little gremlin, Elizabeth Holmes a high-profile flash-in-the-pan curiosity.
This movie is largely not about the crimes of Elizabeth Holmes, which are narrated only briefly at the beginning, not relitigated too much, and somewhat beside the point. It’s a movie that’s instead about psychology and people. There’s a point in the movie where Nathan asks Liz whether he was selected because he couldn’t ask the science questions, and she says that she saw this as a human story. I’m not always a fan of a movie baldly stating its thesis, but it worked here.
One of the things that I love about Nathan Fielder is how much he takes a funhouse mirror approach to topics, amplifying them beyond reason for both humor and to examine them. I’m one of those people who takes The Rehearsal (2022) to largely be about anxiety, especially in its first season. What if you practice well enough to always say the perfect thing? What if you could research a person perfectly so you knew the proper way to act around them? What if you exercised inhuman amounts of control?
And so Elizabeth Holmes is the perfect subject for Nathan Fielder, because she’s the ultimate unknowable woman. She has a reputation for being deceptive and manipulative, but is that actually true? Does she believe many false things? Does she lie as easily as she breathes? Or is she a person being controlled, someone who has, through her relationships, allowed herself to be ignorant, allowed herself to believe dreams that were manifestly untrue?
The character of Billy Evans, then, I take to both be a “colorful character” of the type that Fielder likes to highlight … but also as a reflection of the Fielder character himself. Nathan is always watching, listening, and hovering in the background, and so is Billy. Billy wants to know everything, see everything, plan everything, manipulate everyone. I feel like, if you haven’t seen his other stuff, you might think this is a stretch, but manipulation (and often acknowledgement of that manipulation) is built into both Nathan for You and The Rehearsal. Billy is undeniably the villain of the piece, menacing and angry, but part of his role is as a foil to Nathan.
And the last of our characters was the surprise of Amanda Seyfried, who I now love dearly. She’s a voice of reason, a breath of fresh air, and comes crashing into the movie with opinions on the characters involved. She’s the other foil to Nathan, often looking at his waffling and saying “are you blind? this is bullshit” about it. But she’s also an actress portraying Holmes, doing her own interpretation of events, injecting her own beliefs, and sometimes acting slippery about her culpability in telling Holmes’ story. She comes to Billy’s house on the pretense that she’s going to get him to let his guard down and ends up yelling at him. She cuts through the shit. I wouldn’t have thought, going in, that Amanda Seyfried would be acting as audience surrogate, and yet …
In case it wasn’t obvious, I really loved this movie. There’s so much to chew on, so much to unpack. Nathan is telling the story, controlling what’s seen and what’s heard, enamored with his subject, and, obviously, turning the spotlight back on himself in the process.
For what it’s worth, I thought most of what this movie is doing is very intentionally geared toward telling exactly this story. The film focuses on the ambiguity of communication with the “Who’s on First” bit when the actual case against Holmes was about a large number of materially false statements, and I absolutely do not buy that all of these were a case of her saying one thing while everyone else heard a different thing. And obviously Nathan Fielder is playing up his own character for the film; he knows how it looks to have him lurking in the background like he’s hiding behind a pillar, wearing headphones like a guarantee that he can listen back to a conversation later to make sense of it. Still great though.
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