I don’t go to documentaries too often. More often than not, I’m not sure what to say about them afterwards. I mostly hope I learned something and leave it at that. And that would have gone doubly-so for the new documentary about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. Sure, the documentary is co-directed by comedian Nathan Fielder. That’s bound to put an interesting spin on things. But to sit through a nearly three hour documentary about a woman whose story I knew the bare bones about and wasn’t much interested in learning more than that? That seemed a bit much.
Then I saw the conversation coming from pals Watson and Ryan about it. And the movie I wanted to see, but haven’t and probably won’t until it hits streaming (Digger) had one showing after 9PM, not a good sign and not something I want to do on a night before I go to work. And it’s not the four-hour long Elon Musk documentary,. And the theater looked very crowded when I got tickets on my phone app for a mid-day documentary. Heck, it looked crowded compared to a lot of movies I’ve seen lately. Anyway, I went and…wow, I do not regret that decision for a minute.
To be honest, I had been up a wee bit late the night before, and I was feeling a little drowsy for the first 45 minutes or so. That would be the set-up: Holmes and her partner Billy Evans decided that the world didn’t know the real Elizabeth, so they were letting Fielder and his documentary film crew in to follow them around in the handful of days before she reported for the start of her 11 year prison sentence. The couple has a pair of small children together, and the most important thing seems to be that neither of them, especially Holmes (who doesn’t seem to blink much in the first half of the movie) denies that she did anything wrong, that the devices that Theranos claimed could test blood samples of very small amounts in a very short amount of time absolutely worked (last time I checked, they did not), and Evans seems a wee bit controlling at times. Fielder sits what seems uncomfortably close at times with a glum look on his face, occasionally asks for clarifying questions, the first of which seems to be whether or not Holmes and Evans picked him because he wasn’t a science expert but a comedian.
But as the movie went on, my attention perked with it. Around the halfway point, when Holmes reports to prison (she finally seems to start blinking in those moments), the movie jumps ahead two years, and Fielder is not dealing largely with Evans, a guy who seems to have an inordinate amount of control over Holmes’s life as she sits in prison. The second half of the movie does not make Evans look that good–arguably he doesn’t look too good in the first half either, but the more the movie focuses on Evans, the worse he looks–but Holmes is still a mystery. Does she know she’s lying? Is she lying? How much does she knows about just about everything going on around her? Who, really, is Elizabeth Holmes?
That question is what is at the center of the movie here: Fielder is trying to figure out what Holmes knows, what she wants, how much of what she is doing is manipulation and how much is actually her ignorance of any given situation. It’s more interesting when Fielder has to recreate moments for the movie that he was, for one reason or another, unable to film because then he has to rely on his own memory of events, his limited knowledge of what is going through Holmes and Evans’s heads, and still not knowing who knows what, when he’s being lied to, or even if he’s being lied to, particularly if you go by the George Constanza definition of “It’s not a lie if you believe it.”
What comes out is a fascinating exploration of one woman whose stated goal of letting people see the real her is blunted by the fact that, in the end, Fielder himself isn’t sure he knows who that is. Evans in particular is prone to speaking on Holmes’s behalf with a high level of certainty but no real evidence offered that what he says is true. When Holmes doesn’t quite get the joke behind the old Abbott and Costello routine “Who’s on First?” it is Evens on says why she doesn’t get it while she sits there and lets him do it. Is that the reason the joke went over her head? She doesn’t really say. I don’t think she even nodded along to the idea he presented. At the very least, Fielder managed to get a camera in to look at the lives of people who are used, thanks to money, to a certain amount of privilege in the world, as seen with the absolute certainty that Evans shows whenever anything comes out of his mouth. Fielder doesn’t have that advantage, and his movie reflects that, and I think the movie is better off for it as a result. After all, how can you truly represent what someone is on film when, at the end, you aren’t sure if you can, and Fielder, unlike Holmes or Evans, is not afraid to show the conflict he feels over a subject that he was closely associated with long enough to feel…something for her when all is said and done. Does he pity Holmes? Is he protecting her? Is he condemning her? The fact that he doesn’t seem to know either says quite a lot.
Grade: A
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