YOU CAN SEE EVERYTHING (in theatres)

Visiting this film, realizing my hubris with the debasing of the word “like” was a lost campaign; intelligent people (director Nathan Fielder, Elizabeth Holmes, Billy Evans) soar in the debasement; the documentary/movie would have been 30 minutes shorter if half of the “likes” had been eliminated.

Fielder’s creative approach centers on riveting conversations with Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes just 34 days before her incarceration for fraud. Theranos—a blend of “therapy” and “diagnosis”—failed to deliver on its blood-testing technology, yet Holmes persuaded major institutions to invest in its unfulfilled mission. Her bright, swimmingly blue-eyed responses, radiate innocence and naïveté. The film emphasizes her roles as homemaker, caregiver, and devoted partner, leaving her scientific abilities in the background. Her relationship with Billy comes across as unhealthy, awestruck, and strikingly simplistic.

The unresolved issue rests with the New York Times’s profile of Holmes written by Amy Chozik in 2023 stating that Holmes said about the film “They’re not playing me. They’re playing a character I created.”

The “like” affliction breeds through the second phase, addressing Amanda Seyfried’s interpretation in the miniseries “The Dropout”, with an Emmy Award for Outstanding Actress in the Hulu Series. It is watchable.

“You Can See Everything” is a unique, interesting, intimate portrait, and in some respects problematic; an experience leaving viewers perplexed, indecisive, clueless, earning “like”…..

THREE & ½ STARS

Peneflix