[SPOILER FREE] You Can See Everything is the most challenging film of the year

In Our Time is a world-class seminar every week. Why was Jeremy a lonely snail? What were lions doing in York in the third century? I'm Misha Glenny and every week I'm joined by expert guests to explore the ideas that shape our world. It's one of the first times really that you consistently see someone painting teeth. I know that sounds bonkers. If I was going to define mathematics, I would say it's the study of structure. In Our Time. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Why would I deceive you? There's no reason for me to do that. You don't understand. I'm not well still. I'm Elamin Abdel-Mahmoud and this is Commotion. I promise you we are going to get through this conversation without any big spoilers, but Nathan Fielder's documentary on Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes is here. It's called You Can See Everything. It is easily the most challenging film. It's the best film of the year. Adam Naiman is here. Alyssa Bresnag is here. Chandler Levesque is here. Hello, everybody. I'm real stressed out about this. How's it going? Morning. Hi. How's everybody feeling? It's nice to see you. Chandler, I'm going to start with you because, listen, the quickest way I think to describe this movie is it's a documentary that follows Elizabeth Holmes on the last few days before she checks in for her prison sentence. Again, I'm going to say in this conversation, we're not going to spoil anything, but I'm having a hard time talking. I'm going to say something about the experience of watching this film. And so, Chandler, I'm going to start with you because you saw it last night. What do you tell people about what you just witnessed? Like, how do you contextualize the thing? I mean, I'm still processing just like I think the rest of America. I don't know how to feel about this movie. It's crazy to me that it got me, that it's this level of like raw and cinematic and provocative and strange and kind of like a heightened, you know, episode of the rehearsal at its like highest quality. But also, I really think it's like the movie of the year. There is it truly the movie of the year is it is an understatement. I think like I should say without any spoilers at all, this is going to be the conversation for weeks on end. Now that this movie is out, it's going to start one million conversations. I can't wait to see all of them play out. Alyssa, I think before we get into all of this, can you just remind us you have the honor, the indignity of reminding us who, who exactly Elizabeth Holmes is, right? Yeah, she was the founder and CEO of Theranos, which was a health tech company that created the device called the Edison. The Edison, they claimed, could do a wide range of medical tests with only a small fingerpricks worth of blood. And the idea is you could eliminate the burden of needles and the pain of taking a lot of blood out. Those claims led the company to be valued at something like nine billion dollars at that. At the height of its hype. And Holmes was a really public lauded figure who posed for a lot of magazine covers and often in a black turtleneck like the one Steve Jobs wore. And so she was like a wunderkind of the tech industry. We love these heroes when they come about. But we also love to tear them down when things fall apart. And that happened when a Wall Street Journal reporter named John Cario published an investigation that essentially said that the Edison didn't do all those things that they said it did and that the company was using other commercially available machines to run tests in partnership with Walgreens and whatnot. So that was that from that report. There was like just a cascade of events that led to the company's downfall and included a series of lawsuits, most notably and most relevant to our conversation. Yeah, there was a criminal case that the U.S. brought against Holmes and her ex lover and business partner, Sonny Balwani, and in 2022, she was found guilty of multiple counts of fraud, basically defrauding investors to acquire fraud. And that's where we are now. And that's how that's how that's how we end up here. And I'm going to bring you in on this in just a moment. But Alyssa, this is a documentary that's co-directed is not just Nathan Fielder, it's Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim. We'll get to the Nathan Fielder of it all in a moment because there's so much to talk about there. But let's just who is Lance Oppenheim? Because he's made some documentaries like some kind of heaven and sperm world, what's the thing that makes a Lance Oppenheim documentary, Alyssa? I would say it's like he really enters into the Internet subculture that, you know, we we as like at least me as a millennial has just grown up gazing into. Like there are all these little corners of the Internet that he pulls out and brings alive and he does it in a really dreamlike lens so that we're not gawking and saying, who are these people? But we're actually attached to their hopes and dreams, even if they are delusional or strange. That's him in a nutshell to me. There is the opening shot of the film is Billy Evans, who is Elizabeth Holmes partner. He's talking on the phone and then the camera kind of zooms out. Then you see Elizabeth Holmes and she's framed as behind bars, except the bars are actually the bars of the crib of her baby. Her baby was under one, I think, at the time. And then you kind of go like I'm watching like a like a like a verite regular documentary that is I'm being popped into this world. And then there is the shot where you see Nathan Fielder and he's a bit of a of a villain figure who's kind of like looming over them and I'm going to bring you in on this. How surprised are you to hear that Nathan Fielder, that kind of style of comedy, that's kind of style, a documentarian will be involved in a documentary like this one. Well, I think we would not surprised at all. One thing that. The movie is counting on is that people who are seeing it, who know who Nathan Fielder is, know what to expect of this persona. This kind of lurking elephant in the room, you know, documentarian. They know what to expect formally, which is that he kind of pushes against his own boundaries or inverts them or weaponizes them. I mean, he's not just attentive to form. He kind of makes you aware of form. But the tension here is that I think for the first time, give or take, he's making a movie about someone who is more famous than he is and who is going to draw an audience to this film. I think they're really going to feel like Nathan Fielder is just in the way. It's like he is kind of getting in the way of a more standard Netflix documentary that you can watch with your phone or watch with a glass of wine. And Elizabeth Holmes, you know, as I was saying, becomes a sin eater for all the problems of tech or a symbol of the girl boss gone wrong. And then you've got Nathan and Oppenheim kind of sticking themselves in the middle and saying, that's kind of the movie we're making. It's not really the movie we're making, that that movie isn't viable. This movie's form suggests why a typical documentary about this isn't viable. And as always with Nathan, he is his own subject. And I think the people who are seeing this because they're interested in Elizabeth Holmes are either going to learn an awful lot about him in a short period of time. He's going to be what ruins the movie for them. For people who like Nathan Fielder, which is a not insignificant subset of viewers, though he is a niche artist, HBO is not the center of the world. It's a small audience compared to, you know, most reality TV. But for people who clock him and take him seriously as an artist and as a documentarian, that's the driving interest in this movie, which is what will Nathan do next? I think that the promise that we made earlier in this episode, which is the idea that we're going to have this conversation without a spoiler, I think necessitates that without diving into the details, we talk about the work that this movie is doing. Right. And the work that this movie is doing is structurally, formally, but also just like in terms of just blowing your mind on what the offer is, is Tandler to me, this is a movie that shifted the subject so many times that you can't even keep track of what the subject is and sometimes it's like actually maybe you're the subject used in there in the theater, how dare you react the way that you're reacting right now? And I felt kind of confronted by that quite often. But also it's a movie that's been kept pretty tightly under wraps. They don't want you to reveal some of the big sort of turns that happen in this movie. So, yeah, most people will walk into the movie and they go, OK, I know I'm sitting down, I know that Elizabeth Holmes is about to go to jail, go to prison. But aside from that, that's all we really know about it. But it's really not that at all. So. Without spoiling it, tell us more about this movie. Like, what is this project, do you think, Tandler? Well, I don't know, I always feel like with Nathan and one reason I'm like so obsessed with his his work and having for like, you know, over a decade since it's like very early sketches, you know, with like Laugh Sabbath at the Rivoli with Chris Locke is it's always about like performance and it's always about him like trying to be a good director, you know, and like recreating scenes. And can we get it right this time? What is actually the most truthful and authentic about this moment? How can we, like, prepare as much as possible to do something like the best possible way it can be done? And this movie kind of like deepens it and twisted in such a strange way. And I feel like I started this movie almost like being on the side of Elizabeth Holmes and her husband, kind of like the way that, yeah, any typical Netflix documentary would want you to be and then it it flips over and then you think that maybe like her husband is this kind of like Machiavellian figure. And then you're like, no, it's Elizabeth Holmes. That's like the Lady Macbeth that's like pulling all the strings. And and then at a certain point, it just becomes like another Nathan for you episode where you're like, you know, finding Francis also his his documentary, I think, is really important in finding Francis. There's a relationship that Nathan develops with this sex worker where he kind of falls in love with her and gets really enamored with her. And it's kind of like she teaches him sort of about intimacy. And there's so many moments of, like, incredibly unsettling eye contact in this film. I've never seen eyes, irises photographed this way before, where their faces are just so close. And Elizabeth Holmes is, like, staring deep into Nathan Filler's eyes, being like, you have to trust me. And it's just, it's so unsettling. Hey, it's Danielle and Callie, your hosts of In 3, Canada's number one entertainment news podcast. I've spent more time with Taylor Swift than most other people. We're media pros. We hosted the Verity screening. Besties. Howie has become the hottest Backstreet Boy. Said no one but you ever. Ever. And insiders who have seen it all, IRL. Oscars, Golden Globes, you name it, we have been there. With access to the biggest talent. Welcome to In 3, Patrick J. Adams. Thank you for having me. The fun starts in 3. You know who's not going to survive this? Dad talk. Oh. New episodes Mondays and Thursdays. Yeah, I think the unsettling. Is the word that's a feeling that never really leaves you even after the three hour run time. It's useful, I think, for people to just hear more of the movie. So let's just play a little bit more of the trailer. I think this is the moment in time to capture this story before I'm gone. I fell in love in that first conversation. Before or after that she revealed she was the founder of Theranos? Probably before. I mean, weren't you worried? She was sort of scamming you? 100%. But what did she have to gain from me? Well, isn't your family rich? Yeah, I think there's like a lot of different levels of wealth. Even just watching that trailer now and like the camera's interest in Billy and the way that he's depicted. I'm again, we can't spoil stuff, but at least I'm going to ask. I'm going to ask you. So that's a little bit more of the Nathan Field and Elizabeth Holmes project. You can see everything. Alyssa, you're a fan of Nathan. Uh, what did you think of the movie? I mean, I loved how this, I don't know how to call it like a documentary or movie. Like it seems like it's both. I loved how it refused to give you a tidy answer to any of the questions you had coming into it. So like, I am indeed a Nathan head. I thought of an early Comedy Central episode of Nathan for you, where he like creates an elaborate scenario where he needs to like pick a pair of handcuffs in under a certain amount of time. Or a robot arm will pull his pants down, and there's a bunch of children there and a cop on standby to arrest him for indecent exposure. And the thing that I think that episode has in common with this is he loves a tightrope walk with high stakes and he, and that may have really disastrous consequences for how his audience might receive him or his public image. Um, I honestly think that's what excites him about his work. Um, and it may be in the early days. It was something as literal as being labeled a sex offender. But in this movie, it has a lot more to do with the supposed of, like, I would say the objectivity of a documentary filmmaker in relation to his documentary film subject and how it can be really, really hard to separate oneself from the baseline intimacy created by an agreement like this, um, in such a vulnerable moment. Oh, baseline intimacy is a good way to put it. Go ahead, Adam. Well, and on that idea of intimacy, I mean, this is the thing for people with a field area and frame of reference or familiarity with. And he calls the fielder method, you know, you keep picking and choosing. And I thought the emotional core of the first season of the rehearsal, which is my favorite thing he's made still, this is right up there, is it's so much about this longing for family and to be a father. Yeah. Which he makes very explicit in the rehearsal. And you keep stopping yourself going, is this sentimental? Because this is also deeply exploitative and manipulative. But those are the lines of intimacy to Alyssa's point that kind of get crossed on the rehearsal. And they get crossed up here, too. That first shot that you're describing, it's not just the bars. It's the family. It's the family. That's right. And that Nathan is on the other side of it. And he is embedded with this family in a way where the family dynamics, they're not getting in the way. They're what he's living with. And you sort of go, is this really about, you know, Theranos means this woman's about to go to jail and be away from her kids. And this father is going to be looking after them. To some extent, the celebrity and the notoriety falls away as much as it can. Yeah. And what's just so palpable is Nathan's both desire and his incompatibility or his weird intrusion. Almost home invasion of this family. And that carries through the entire movie as well. That's the sort of intimacy that I am just left thinking about over and over again after I've seen the film. Is how much it ties to those themes of loneliness and wanting. And it's interesting. It's like, is it a spoiler to sort of say what a movie is about if a movie is about multiple things? I don't think it's a spoiler to say that this movie is to some extent not just about Nathan's desire for family, but just parental relationships and romantic relationships. Yeah. And dynamics. It's a big part of what it's about. Not by accident. Yeah. By design. Yeah. Go ahead, Shannon. I mean, we're talking about, sorry. We're talking about the Wizard of Loneliness here. Yeah. As he was famously called. And there's a point where Elizabeth Holmes tells him that she thinks he'd be a really good father. You know, Elizabeth Holmes is like 20 minutes away from going to jail. And she's in the last moments where she's going to get to hold like her husband, father of her children. Like, you know, that intimacy. And Nathan Fielder is just sitting in the chair next to them. And you're like, why, you know, why would anybody in good faith want Nathan Fielder inserted there in that moment? He's wondering that too. And you can see it on his face for sure. Should I go? And they're like, no. And they're like, we don't care. And then it's just like, yeah, I mean, there's this moment where I think they compare themselves to Meghan Markle and Harry. Why can't I remember? And the Netflix documentary. Yeah. And yeah. And so it's like kind of how they see themselves versus like Nathan kind of trying to determine who this person really is. And the last thing I just wanted to say was like, I think she's also kind of code switching for Nathan. And in the same way that she like deepened her voice to like a lower register when she was trying to like present as the CEO of Theriot. I think she's giving herself a Canadian accent when she talks. You think the performance extends to the way that she's mirrored? She's mirroring his accent, do you think? Yeah, I can hear it. I mean, I am going to have to go watch this movie again anyway. And so that is definitely going to be something that I'm going to be kind of like scanning for. Alyssa, I think the thing that we're circling is this movie is asking a lot of questions, but is it successful at posing those questions? And one measure of a success of whether you pose the questions or not is how people react. And I've never seen a theater lobby so buzzing with just yelling, I think. When we were leaving the movie theater. There's a quote from co-director Lance Oppenheimer that I want to bring up. He says that while filming this movie, quote, we would unpack the day's events and no one would agree on the seemingly mundane moments that would transpire. Everyone had a different point of view. That's the end of the quote. In our office, in our office in commotion, like the next morning after a bunch of us saw it, we would be sitting around going, I don't know how much of that was real. I don't know how much of that was staged. We would be identifying different parts where we go. I think that was real. Somebody else would go. I think that was staged. Like, there is so much playing around with what we receive as truth and like the work of the camera and how much the camera can kind of distort that. How much were you questioning whether what you were seeing was actually real or not? I mean, like all the time, the entire time. I would say, like, in my heart, I'm a skeptic and a journalist. And but I'm also not so foolhardy to think that there's any real way of knowing Holmes's motivations in a black and white way. Like, I, I respected the mission of this. Not to relitigate hard scientific facts, but to reveal a truth about a certain dynamic. And so I like I don't think it's a spoiler to reference a moment where Nathan shows Elizabeth Holmes, a famous Abbott and Costello who's on first skit. She has a really hard time understanding that joke. And and so that's a moment where, like, I think we really pause it as the audience and ask. Like, is this willful naivete? Like, how do you not get this? Like, this is such a famous skit. And I think the unknowability of her there is meant to mirror our own internal lie detectors back to us. Like, and I find that to be a really thrilling experience. Like, that's the point of art even to to get your mind working in a way where, like, you are searching within you to say, like, like, do I believe her? Like, what's going on here? Like, I don't understand the dynamic of this conversation. And that was me the entire time in this film. That's that's my favorite feeling leaving a movie. The feeling of like, is everything that I just experienced, how was it manipulated to make me feel in a certain way? And to have those questions kind of be sort of left unanswered. Adam, it looked like you were going to say something there. Well, yeah, I like that you use the word art because I think that documentary and art are often separated when they shouldn't be. They're fused together. And every documentary is a sum of artistic choices. And we've reduced it to information and we've reduced it to this idea. Of, you know, what is the film in the movie? There's an amazing moment where you see Billy is reading on. He's like watching a YouTube video on double speed because he's just trying to absorb the information. And I thought that that was very purposefully there. Tell it, you know, this accelerated absorption of information, which, to be fair, in a scientific venture, I guess you don't have time to diddle around with art. But I mean, but Nathan and Oppenheim very much do. They have a lot of thought about framing and composition and color grading and sound and editing. And they're doing these things not to sort of distract. you and make you passive but i think to make you active which is what great documentaries do is the craft is forward they don't they don't bury their own artifice they kind of lay it bare but even in laying it bare there's a kind of artifice you know in the rehearsal nathan would do this thing where he'd show you the edges of the set and he'd be beyond the edges of the set and then there's still more of a set and it's like you're in a borges story it's like where does this end right and i thought that that was extremely dizzying in in this film it's in the service of art but it's also in the service of this incredible anxiety about technology around the edges of the movie the subject of the movie is an ai but you see it around the edges everywhere everything and you see these cyber trucks and you see a society that is sort of you know made in this simulated image that even if it's not the movie subject you feel it ambiently yeah almost subliminally and it's not parallel to what the movie's about it's what the movie's about i or one of the things that i think it is deeply crucially engaged with deeply engaged with i mean i think like that's the reaction that i'm having and i i first of all i just have to say i am so painfully aware of the fact that we are talking about a film you can see everything that is going to be the biggest conversation around for the next little while and we can't spoil it we cannot spoil it and that is not going to be the thing that we do on this show we will have a spoiler conversation that's going to be up on our podcast for you at a certain point but while we're trying to talk around this film the thing that we can do is talk about the work that this film does and in some ways chandler i think like one of the effective things that this movie does for me is it raises it raises the question for me of like my relationship with the camera my relationship with the camera as mediator and the idea of like oh i actually like i'm a pretty trusting person to a degree that i didn't realize how much of a trusting person i was until nathan fielder threw me for a loop and then did it several times and as i was watching this film i think he was trying to say i the medium of documentary actually even the medium of documentary has these limitations and if we don't do that then we're not going to be able to do it if we don't acknowledge the limitations then we will not be living in a world that is even close to truth how did you feel about like the work of the camera in this film because like to me like that was a clear kind of subject matter that nathan wanted to work with yeah i mean it's it's so aestheticized you know you have these kind of like slow creeping zooms and you know there's so many every time you go to like a reaction shot of nathan fielder i really involuntarily laugh but i wonder how much of that is also part of like the film grammar that he's always working with like in the rehearsal or nathan for you you know yeah so it's like interesting because you're kind of like there's like the pseudo ironic tones of the movie but then it's also you're capturing these very deeply human moments like elizabeth holmes bursting out in tears because she just put like all of the breast milk that you know she needed to put in the fridge for you know her newborn baby like right before she goes to jail so it's like it kind of gets ruptured and then and then you kind of sink back into this kind of like dream movie and that like tonal inquiry on grudy is is really fascinating to witness like i feel like when i was first watching it it was like extremely passively as a viewer just thinking it's a film and like taking everything at face value and it didn't i don't maybe i'm stupid but it didn't occur to me to like kind of question what was going on and maybe that's just because elizabeth holmes's eyes are just so damn entrancing and she's such a good performer as the character of herself which you yeah um but um at a certain point yeah things rupture in a very very fascinating way um thanks to a special twist and um and it's unlike anything i've ever seen uh i'm very conscious of the fact that there's already oscar buzz for this movie it's certainly going to be one of the big hits of this year a bunch of people even including people around the stable been like oh yeah it's this is just is the movie of the year uh is it possible to gauge what the reaction this movie are actually going to be adam like do you think that's it's is it in the in the conversation for like best picture are we there i mean i mean possibly i mean it's certainly going to be an interesting study in commercial releasing you know it comes on the heels of oppenheim's other movie prime time which it could be a double bill what they could switch titles to you could call this one prime time and which lance oppenheim's uh prime time came out two weeks ago that's what i'm saying so it's it's you know they'd go well on a double bill you know that film which is about chris hansen and to catch a predator was again a very kind of like chattering classes media class kind of movie it didn't really it didn't really hit you know yeah and i think that this one is tracking to do very well dot dot dot for a documentary you know whatever that means but then there's sort of the question of is it even one yeah i mean i think it has real commercial prospects but i think the currency that it has is that currency of conversation and discourse yeah which is probably in this case going to be pretty much inexhaustible yeah both in ways that i look forward to and in ways that'll probably be insufferable because i almost feel insufferable thinking and talking about the movie because one of the meanings of the title you can see everything is people also kind of hallucinate while watching this movie they see what they want to see and then they want to share it excitably with everybody else which i think is wonderful yeah but i also think the same thing that's going to fuel that conversation is going to make certain people very sick of it and i will say that for people who do not i agree for people who do not mess with the nathan fielder thing yeah oh you're gonna be so tired the people are going to be a long award season and we're even if you like him but you're tired of this reflexive anointing of him as a kind of cultural genius yeah people are going to be frustrated i i completely agree i think we're going to leave this conversation here there will be a spoiler conversation in our feed so if you've seen the movie and you're dying to talk about it please go to the commotion youtube feed or the podcast feed okay just before i let you guys go i would love a recommendation from each of you uh chad little why don't i start with you pal what do you got okay well i have something that's in the field which is um john wilson's the history of concrete it's a an incredible documentary that i wish was like six hours long like no other filmmaker could make me want to watch a six-hour documentary about the history of concrete he also goes on many many side quests i haven't seen it but like fascinating characters and it's it's just so delightful and funny and and just sublime and his curiosity about people and his love of just you know the city that he comes from and just sort of like the texture and the weird idiosyncrasies of life just like blew me away yet again listen i'm desperate to say it i still have not seen it elisa brosnack what do you got pal what recommendation do you have for me i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't i want to recommend remy wolf's mud let's go yeah it's like lived in messy like the the funk that she's known for is there but like she's got an amazing rock voice and it's it's just a great emotional release and something you can really jam to and i recommend listening all the way through it's a great full album i rarely have the feeling of hey why is this person not as more famous and i think remy wolf is like a hundred percent on that list of why isn't this artist everybody listened to adam naman take us home pal what do you got i was going to recommend just staring at a wall thinking about nathan but no um something i haven't watched yet but i'm going to recommend just because i know what it's about and i'm looking forward to it is a documentary that's airing on movie called pulp what do you do for an encore which was filmed during pulp's last tour and i'm looking forward to watching slightly better professionally shot concert footage of a band that i like interspersed with interviews i'm a simple person a simple simple pleasure i like these songs i like this band give it to me the songs i like this band give it to me the songs i like this band give it to me the songs i like this the band we we love pulp pulp forever so i think i'm going to try and watch that this weekend okay guys thank you so much for those recommendations my recommendation is going to be that you go watch you can see everything and then come back to our podcast feed because there will be a spoiler conversation we're going to spoil the movie because i think like there's some things about this movie where you just got to get into the details of it in order to fully talk about it so go watch the movie and then come back to our podcast feed and listen to our spoiler conversation with these wonderful folks elisa breznack is going to be on the podcast feed and i'm going to a former tech journalist and gq's wellness and grooming director she's in los angeles chandler levac is a writer and filmmaker she's also in los angeles adam naman is a film and tv critic whose work shows up in the ringer and the toronto star he was with me right here in toronto you can see everything is out in theaters now that is it for the show today this week commotion was produced by stewart burman ty calendar nathan chisholm jess low and nikki manfredi our digital producers are vanya matabja amelia akbal ray mona and tj heineman our engineers this week are sam hashmi and emily carvasio our director is daniel grogan john perry and jean kim are our senior producers this week and our executive producer is beza sefa i'm alamin abdul mahmoud and also by the way i gotta tell you i'm gonna be away for the next week or so uh my pal rad sam and play and then after that my pal emil niyazi will be filling in on the show and then i'll be back the week after next but if you're around in vancouver next week i you should you should drop me a line i'm there for you for the vancouver writers festival it's one of my favorite times of the year please come and hang up there's gonna be some wonderful events so i would love to see you there in the meantime at rad and emil will hold it down on the show commotion will be back on monday see you then for more cbc podcasts go to cbc.ca slash podcasts