Elizabeth Holmes documentary You Can See Everything is vying for top spot at the Oscars

Does any part of you worry about me being here 24-7? I don't think so. Well, what if I see something that makes you look bad? You Can See Everything is a documentary focusing on Theranos founder and convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes. It's making big waves at the box office. Several screenings sold out a week into the film's run. It's also vying for a top spot at the Oscars. The movie, co-directed by Canadian Nathan Fielder, who actually got his start on CBC's This Hour, has 22 minutes. But what did she have to gain from me? Well, isn't your family rich? Yeah, I think that there's like a lot of different levels of wealth. Come jump in with me. So what is it about this documentary that is so popular with so many people? Alison Wilmore is a film critic at Vulture and New York Magazine. Hi there, Alison. Hi there. Is this your film of the year? It is definitely my film of the year. I've seen it twice already. I don't know what it means that this year the buzziest films have been an adaptation of Homer, an experimental three-hour documentary, but I love it. That is quite something. I wouldn't have put bingo chips on that one for sure. But look, can you take me back a bit? I think a lot of people will remember the story of Elizabeth Holmes, but the way in which this is told is really what makes it stand out. yeah i don't think that any of us might have assumed that there'd be more to say about Elizabeth Holmes, whose story about the rise and fall of Theranos about being convicted for fraud uh with her investors i i feel like we saw that in podcasts in documentaries in the Hulu series The Dropout which also plays a role in this documentary and yet this movie finds some new angle uh through Elizabeth Holmes and her partner Billy Evan inviting Nathan Fielder and his co-director Lance Oppenheim into their home in the three weeks before she is about to go to prison to serve an 11 year sentence and are basically saying like we think the path towards clearing her name or like clearing at least changing the way she's thought about in the public is to just allowing you to film everything you can have access to everything in this incredibly kind of tense intimate moment in their lives i have not seen it but i've heard from people who have describing how in the theaters there's just all these different groups of people who are there for different reasons inspired by different things um and that i found fascinating but also fascinating is um i don't want to give anything away here but some of the recreations that are there can you take me through that yeah i don't want to spoil the second half of the film too much because a lot of people haven't had a chance to see it yet but it really expands on something that Nathan Fielder has done a lot which is to create these like uh recreations of environments recreations of interactions with characters and uh some of this comes about in part because Elizabeth Holmes goes to prison you know she's no longer someone he can access and so much of this movie is about asking how you really know what's going on inside someone's head and inside their hearts and the ways in which this movie in its second half like goes in directions i had they never expected that involve recreations that involve uh looking at these different versions of Elizabeth Holmes that have been on screen I think it's just brilliant it's an incredible evolution of what Nathan Fielder has been doing in his career. He is known for his quirky sense of humor but would you have picked him out of a lineup of potential directors for this kind of a project? Never in a million years though when you see them together Nathan Fielder and Elizabeth Holmes it makes this incredible amount of sense in that they're both people who are famous for playing personas and for leaning into personas leaning into the nature of like truth and performance in a way the movie especially in its first half feels almost like a duel between these two people who are trying to figure each other out and also maybe trying to pull the wool over each other's eyes uh it's really incredible what do you think it says that i mean in in that first week it was really hard to get a ticket yeah i mean in part i think it says that people have been going back to the movies more, which is something that I, as a film critic, am obviously a huge fan of. I'm all about getting to, you know, go out to the theater if you can. But I think it also speaks to just how, this seems to speak to our times, not just in terms of the Elizabeth Holmes story, but in terms of the personas that people in tech have adapted, you know, the visionary founder, or in the case of Elizabeth Holmes' partner, the kind of like grind sets, uh you know like taxi tech uh businessman it really speaks to the ways in which those personas maybe lead in front of all of the actual work that people are doing and the persona almost matters more in this age of cameras and we're so used to seeing it and used to thinking of it as something that's maybe real maybe not and i think this movie interrogates that so brilliantly uh it really speaks to something we've all that's been in the air and that we've all been thinking about for a long time i gotta tell you i cannot think of the last time a documentary won for Best Picture Oscar has it yeah a documentary has never been nominated for Best Picture okay so so this would be first and i think it has a pretty good chance honestly it has been just beyond the acclaim people have been responding to it so strongly it feels unignorable as a force that the Oscars are going to have to contend with quite something Allison Wilmore thank you so much thanks for having me.