INSTANT CLASSIC

The Year’s Best Film Is This All-Time Great Mind-Melter

You’ve never seen anything like Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s magnificent “You Can See Everything.”

From Nathan for You to The Curse to The Rehearsal, Nathan Fielder has evolved his comedy of inquisitive weirdness into something wholly and electrically new—a blending of awkward humor, social and psychological analysis, and structural inventiveness that melds fiction and non-fiction, wit and gravity, in ways that are often head-spinningly difficult to parse.

Yet even his prior mind-melting works can’t fully prepare viewers for You Can See Everything (screening at the New York Film Festival before its Oct. 16 theatrical release), a complex portrait of disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes that tumbles down the rabbit hole with bewildering inventiveness. Co-directed by Lance Oppenheim (Primetime), it’s not just the film of the year—it’s a documentary that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the form’s all-time greats.

Thirty-four days before Holmes (in 2023) begins an eleven-year federal prison sentence for defrauding investors in her company Theranos—which promised to revolutionize blood testing with a proprietary device known as the Edison—Fielder and Oppenheim begin filming her, her husband Billy Evans, and their two children at a beachside San Diego rental house. When they arrive, Elizabeth and Billy are fretting over a quote from The New York Times about movies based on her life (“They’re not playing me. They’re playing a character I created”), which they say is incorrect.

They believe Elizabeth must have actually said “a character they created,” but despite recording her interviews themselves, they can’t prove it. Their fixation is apt for You Can See Everything, given that the prime question tackled by Fielder (who appears on camera, often watching through windows and around corners) and Oppenheim (who largely remains off-screen) is whether Elizabeth is as authentic as she purports to be—a mystery that, unsurprisingly, turns out to be maddeningly tough to solve.

From the outset, You Can See Everything’s mood is simultaneously playful, ominous, and probing. The directors alternate between master shots that take everything in and intense close-ups that foreground Elizabeth, Billy, and Nathan’s countenances, creating intimacy and curiosity amplified by slow zooms that feel like the camera lens opening as wide as Elizabeth’s large, mesmerizing doll’s eyes.

In the film’s numerous ultra-tight facial compositions, a suggestion of romantic feelings shared by Elizabeth and Nathan also materializes. Still, the main love affair—strange as it is—is between the convict and her spouse, even though the latter constantly, semi-hostilely interrupts conversations and asserts his authority in a way that’s at once surprising and off-putting.

[WARNING: Minor spoilers follow]

Fielder is a comedic auteur who likes to get insanely involved in the stories he’s telling, and he soon moves in with Elizabeth and Billy. The boundaries between filmmaker and subject are as thin as those separating honesty from deception, fiction from reality, and seriousness from silliness (epitomized by a farting horse and a gratuitous pan up a nude showering body), and Fielder navigates them with a mixture of creepy deadpan drollness and insistent interrogation.

Nonetheless, he finds himself incapable of definitively deciphering whether Elizabeth, who steadfastly asserts, “I did not commit any crime,” is a naïve individual being exploited by others—namely Billy, a domineering and shady man not dissimilar from her former beau and business partner Sunny Balwani—or “the most manipulative person who ever lived.”

Fielder’s uncertainty about Elizabeth breeds frustration that peaks during a chat about her infamous quote to Forbes about the Edison’s ability to perform the 200 clinical tests (from a single drop of blood) it promised, with Elizabeth defining “can” in such obfuscating fashion that Fielder is inspired to show her, as an analogy, Abbott & Costello’s “Who’s on First” comedy routine.

That neither Elizabeth nor Billy know this famous bit is one of numerous instances in which You Can See Everything generates hilarity from the bizarre situations at hand. More relevant, though, is Elizabeth’s failure to understand what makes the routine funny—a cluelessness that suggests her weirdo brain may be unable to separate fact from fiction, the latter of which she claims she has never uttered in her entire life.

The more Fielder and Oppenheim poke and prod the duo, the more bonkers contradictions and puzzles they uncover. As Elizabeth’s incarceration date approaches, You Can See Everything becomes a multilayered study of a woman who’s either gullible, forthright, and decent; devious and demented; or something altogether unique. Even after she’s behind bars, Fielder and Oppenheim refuse to abandon their mission to decode the peculiar, eerie billionaire-turned-pariah. After a two-year time jump, they resume their sleuthing with methods honed on The Rehearsal and transform the proceedings into a funhouse-mirror hallucination of performance, memory, duplicity, confrontation, interpretation, and co-option.

Fielder yearns to understand the world and its inhabitants (and, by extension, himself) through the prism of art and the facsimile existences it conjures, and You Can See Everything plays as a natural extension of his TV hits. With Ari Balouzian’s score segueing freely from intriguing to mischievous to menacing, the film piles on scripts, impersonations, and dramatic recreations until the genuine and the counterfeit are one.

Still, Fielder and Oppenheim never lose sight of their primary concerns, and the intense focus and clarity of their collaboration is all the more bracing given how haywire the action becomes, complete with multiple scenes that elicit gasps followed immediately by astonished laughter.

There’s never a moment when You Can See Everything isn’t twisting itself in knots, such that during a late discussion between Fielder and a not-to-be-named-here co-conspirator, he manages to implicate this colleague in the same sort of misleading conduct that Elizabeth thinks she’s been victimized by—and which she’s also likely perpetrated.

By the end of this documentary head-trip, the depths of Billy and Elizabeth’s untrustworthiness are more than anyone (including Fielder) might have imagined. However, their unreliability is not, ultimately, incompatible with their crazily professed amour for each other, and that dichotomy is merely one of many irreconcilable elements that give the film its delirious verve.

Whether Elizabeth is or isn’t a liar may be the nominal issue at the heart of You Can See Everything, but that’s just the catalyst for an intricate and increasingly self-reflexive investigation into, among other things, the incomprehensibility of love, the allure of celebrity, and the vexing impossibility of conclusively knowing others. Moreover, it pushes documentary techniques and devices to the breaking point, making it a tangled treatise on its own capacity to deduce the truth.

Residing somewhere between reality and fantasy, doubt and certainty, infatuation and incredulity, You Can See Everything is a genre-bending magnum opus of breathtaking order—one that recognizes it’s seeing everything and yet, hard as it tries, not quite seeing the very thing it’s looking for.

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Nick SchagerEntertainment Critic

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