“Don’t you find that strange? I made a television program about business scams to some extent, and you’ve gotten into trouble because of… some kind of business scam as well?” comedian and film producer Nathan Fielder asked Elizabeth Holmes gently.
In 2023, one month before this notorious Theranos CEO went to jail to serve a 11-year sentence, Holmes contacted A24 in a last-ditch attempt to clear her name in front of the public. Feld, along with director Lance Oberhaim, took on this seemingly impossible project: to uncover who this infamous Stanford dropout really was.
“I actually never thought of it in that way,” Holmes said, “I think they are completely different things.”
No one is more suited than Field to explore the depths of Holmes's psyche. His satirical documentary reality show “Nathan for You” instantly made him a cult celebrity: in the show, he played an exaggerated, expressionless version of himself, attempting to help small businesses in trouble through absurd interventions. In an early episode that later became a huge hit, Field convinced a coffee shop to change its name to “Dumb Starbucks” as a marketing gimmick; at the same time, he also consulted a lawyer to ensure he was not crossing the fragile line of parody law and thus avoid legal troubles.
“If you had just said at that time that Theranos was actually just a comedy sketch, maybe you could have come out of it unscathed,” Field said to Holmes.
"That's true."
"I was just joking a little bit earlier. Maybe that joke wasn't quite appropriate."
We have long known that Elizabeth Holmes is not innocent. However, what we still cannot figure out is whether, when she claimed that she had done nothing wrong, she truly believed that to her very heart. Even while sitting in the courtroom, listening to the testimonies of investors who lost hundreds of millions of dollars, to the whistleblowers who were silenced for pointing out that the Theranos blood testing equipment was not functioning properly, and to the accounts from patients who took actions based on those erroneous test results, Holmes never wavered.
In Field's series of comedic works filled with meta-textual elements, even his most ardent fans are never able to discern when he is performing and when he is being his true self. It has even become a question whether Field himself knows where to draw that line.
In this sense, Field and Holmes are quite similar: more than a decade after they came into the public eye, onlookers are still attracted by their ambiguous personas.
“The world believes a reality about me, but that’s not true,” she said to Field, “I know I haven’t committed any crimes.”
[The following film reviews contain spoilers.]
In the early stages of filming, The New York Times published a feature article about Holmes. That report was widely criticized at the time because it allowed Holmes to portray herself as an innocent mother, a person who had been deprived of the opportunity to watch her children grow up.
However, Holmes and her husband, Billy Evans, the heir to the hotel business, were still furious about that article.
In an interview, Holmes told a New York Times reporter that she had no issue with actress Amanda Seyfried's portrayal of her in the Hulu miniseries The Dropout, because “what they play is not me. They play a character that I created.”
She and her husband insist that this statement has been taken out of context. They claim to have evidence showing that what Holmes actually said was: “They are playing a character they created themselves.” In this way, she does not have to admit that she deliberately crafted a false persona in her capacity as the CEO of Theranos.
After Holmes was imprisoned, Field was racked with worry over how to make use of the footage he had recorded over a month. To help himself understand her confusing behavior, he found a partner more suitable than anyone else: the very actor who played Holmes in The Dropout.
Field showed Seifried a cruel clip: it was from the time he was getting along with Holmes, when he tried to watch “The Dropout” together with the real-life prototype of the character in the series. When the video reached a tense scene involving Holmes’ ex-boyfriend, who had a strong controlling desire and was also Theranos’s former “co-conspirator” Sunny Barwani—now also imprisoned—Holmes could no longer bear to watch this fictional version of herself. She turned her head away and cried.
In other words, Severid is watching Holmes react to “Holmes played by Severid”, and it’s very likely that Holmes himself has also been playing some kind of role all along. But Severid is not the only one who is piecing together a “real Elizabeth” in a rough manner. Evans also created a highly realistic AI avatar for his wife, placed it inside a large vertical screen, and then pushed it next to the dining table so that it could “eat” with him and the children, as if she were really there.
The remainder of the film is like a group of character personalities colliding with each other. Although this is a non-fiction documentary, it is evident that all those involved are also performing for the camera to some extent. How could they not do so? Sefried's determination to understand Holmes's story seems sincere, but viewers will not overlook the fact that she has just secured a leading role in one of the most highly anticipated films of the year with this work.
At the same time, Evans' behavior was so appalling that it was almost unbelievable, to the point where one might wonder if he was deliberately playing the villain in order to gain sympathy for his own despised wife.
Evans knows that Field and Oberhaim do not believe Holmes is innocent. This documentary will not cause anyone to change their mind and believe that his wife was wrongly imprisoned in a federal jail. However, Evans behaves in such an offensive manner that some viewers may end up sympathizing with Holmes upon leaving the theater, seeing her as a victim, and thus allowing her to further reinforce another persona she adopted during the trial: that of an innocent, docile woman who is manipulated by her ex-partner and, without realizing it, continues to tell increasingly harmful lies.
After Holmes was imprisoned, Field was not allowed to bring recording equipment when visiting her. Therefore, he tried to write down the script of their conversations from memory, while also painstakingly restoring the subtle differences in their talk—because in such conversations, every word is of great significance. As Sefried reprises her role in The Dropout, we see the two of them rehearsing and reading this script together, with Field constantly modifying the wording as she tries to recall Holmes' exact words and tone.
In Holmes's voice, Severid said, 'People thought that Amanda's show was a documentary. Because of the way she portrayed me, I suffered even worse treatment in prison.'
"That's not something I caused," said the actor, "it was something she did herself."
