Reposted from Letterboxd because I wound up writing a thousand words on this sucker and I figured that was worth a blog post.
This is not a review of the movie because it’s impossible to just talk about what’s going on up on the screen. Like all of Nathan Fielder’s work, it exists in conversation with our cultural moment. It’s not a movie about Elizabeth Holmes, it’s a movie about how we have reacted to Elizabeth Holmes over the course of the last decade. We will always be reacting to Elizabeth Holmes, I guess. A thousand years from now historians will be talking about the strange fertility goddess/demoness Holm, and her relationships with a series of violent war gods.
Sorry. It’s been a really tiring decade and I get manic from time to time.
I saw this movie at an AMC matinee on a Monday, with a theater maybe 15% occupied. When Amanda Seyfried explained how she felt about Charlie Kirk, I clapped. The rest of the theater followed suit. It’s absolutely wild how this has become a miniature phenomenon. Maybe everyone else is getting manic too, two weeks before the midterms.
As a movie, it’s adventurous and remarkable, which I had expected although I didn’t know exactly how. I knew how Amanda Seyfried figured into the movie, but I did not realize exactly what sort of energy she was going to bring. The scene where she’s watching Elizabeth Holmes and Nathan Fielder watching her performance in The Dropout is the exact point at which the roller coaster hits the top of the track and begins that long confusing descent.
Until that point, it’s maybe just a movie about how Elizabeth Holmes is a neurodivergent dreamer who everyone misunderstands, and who is taken advantage of by a series of intense men. Fielder is being slowly won over on screen. Billy Evans is getting set up as the villain of the piece. The kids are cute.
Then, boom. We keep getting scenes where Amanda Seyfried is forced to think about how her portrayal of the fictionalized Holmes affects Holmes herself, and how the fiction may or may not itself constitute a lie. Acting isn’t real. But that twists back around, right? Because as we watch Seyfried come to the (fair and justified) conclusion that it’s OK to show things that didn’t happen, but could have, we have to realize that in this movie, Seyfried is Holmes is Seyfried.
In other words, Elizabeth Holmes is also an actress playing a part. This is why Fielder puts so much time into the quote “They’re not playing me. They’re playing a character I created.”
At the same time, Nathan Fielder is Billy Evans is Nathan Fielder. There’s another pivotal scene where Fielder and Evans and Seyfried are talking about Evans’ control of Holmes’ Twitter account. It’s depicted as horrible that Evans is saying all these things that Holmes would never say, which is accurate; it’s controlling and awful. Poor Holmes.
Then, maybe half an hour later, Fielder and Seyfried are reenacting his visit to Holmes in prison. There’s a line that makes Holmes look bad. Fielder pauses the reenactment, frowns, and rationalizes his way into changing the line in a way that absolves Holmes. Look at that: it’s another man editing what Holmes said to protect her. Or maybe it’s not, maybe Fielder was just correcting himself. But you can see Seyfried clocking what’s going on, although she doesn’t verbally protest.
She deserves an Academy Award for this role, by the by. A24 is going to submit her performance. Good.
There’s a point in my thinking about this movie — about this cultural phenomenon — where I drift into uninformed psychoanalysis. Fielder sure doesn’t provide any answers, not even elliptical ones; in a way that’s a flaw, because it would be easy to come out of this movie with complete sympathy for Holmes.
But I think there’s a coherent story here about a woman who uses control freaks as armor. Sunny Balwani was a control freak. Billy Evans is clearly a control freak. Nathan Fielder is a control freak, who uses his cameras and flat affect as a way to generate the insights he craves.
Sunny Balwani was also, almost certainly, an abuser. A 40 year old man dating a 19 year old college dropout who was in the process of recovering from rape? That’s bad. You wonder a bit about whether or not Holmes would have become the manipulator she became in a world where none of that happened to her; did dating Balwani and the power she accumulated in that decade create the person who built the artificial person who fascinates us?
Either way, though, sympathy or not, Fielder is showing us a woman who uses control freak men as shields. The entire narrative about whether or not she knew Evans was negotiating a piece of the movie’s profits — it’s exactly the same as the narrative that Balwani was hiding things from her. And that first act of the movie, in retrospect, is Holmes seeing Fielder’s tendencies to seek control and explanations and feeding him one that will cause him to… well, to change his notes on a prison interview to exonerate her.
This is another role that Amanda Seyfried plays in the movie. As a sympathetic observer standing in for the audience, she is repelled by Billy Evans. See my previous note on the AMC audience cheering her when Evans is particularly grotesque. Holmes needs men like that around her because their bad behavior pulls focus away from her flaws.
And then, over time, Seyfried rethinks her reactions. The prison visit reenactment is where she really flips, as she hears about Holmes criticizing her to Fielder — as she hears about Holmes trying to put a wedge between her and Fielder.
That’s the thesis of the movie. It’s about the nature of Holmes’ manipulative techniques. It’s fucking great.
In the first few minutes, there are plenty of closeups of Elizabeth Holmes in conversation. She’s blinking a lot. Once we get to the first conversation between Fielder and Holmes, she barely blinks. He calls it out as a flirting technique, then never returns to that note. It’s up to us, the audience, to remember all the little pieces if we want to make sense of this monster.