Prior to this month I was beginning to worry there was something wrong with me. In a year of new waves, record-breaking hits, and extreme Anne Hathaway saturation, I was overwhelmingly feeling numb at the movies. Sure, there were plenty of things I liked—even liked very much.
But overwhelmingly, my enthusiasm was lacking. Oh, how I yearned to be knocked off my feet, to float out of a theater with a glow that led strangers to ask what drug I’d taken. There were a few films at this year’s New York Film Festival—my go-to fall fest—that provided a solid high.
But leave it to Nathan Fielder to really send me soaring into the stratosphere. You Can See Everything, the Elizabeth Holmes doc that Fielder co-directed with Lance Oppenheim, is a surprisingly heartbreaking, utterly staggering work of—yes, I’ll say it—genius. And part of what’s so thrilling about it is that its genius is not one of invention, but rather of perception.
Fielder and Oppenheim take Holmes’s invitation to see everything, and they push “can”—the film’s critical word—to its limit, provoking questions about differences in perception, the value and ethics of depiction, and limits in the pursuit of truth. In a year of moviegoing sensations, this is the one that both feels most deeply of this moment—reflecting what technology has done to us, and also pushing back against its tendency to flatten us—and the one that will most stand the test of time. At one point in You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder asks Elizabeth Holmes why she enlisted him of all people to document her final days before being sent to prison.
Holmes struggles to come up with an answer and her partner mentions that Fielder, like Holmes, thinks differently. Whatever the true motivation, the pairing—and add to it co-director Lance Oppenheim—could not be more perfect. Fielder and Oppenheim’s thematic concerns, aesthetic proclivities, and metafictional methods make for the most intriguing, layered, and complex portrait yet of the disgraced Theranos founder—one that deeply probes ideas around truth, manipulation, human psychology, and artistic portrayal.
It’s not just the film of the year; it’s the film of the decade. There have been countless movies about the making of movies, but there’s one part of the process I’d never seen depicted on screen: location scouting. Location scouts are often siloed off from the rest of a crew, and their jobs aren’t glamorous.
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