The Most Shocking Thing About ‘You Can See Everything’: Its Sympathy

Ever since the first trailer went up for “You Can See Everything,” if not since word of the movie got up, schadenfreude lovers have been rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of Elizabeth Holmes getting more of what’s coming to her. Especially knowing that Holmes and her husband Billy Evans actually sought out Nathan Fielder, who exudes a natural skepticism, to make the documentary, there’s been an anticipatory bloodlust, that they must have been fools to imagine they were doing anything but helping set their own trap. That’s not a completely ill-founded expectation: Holmes comes off in the doc as every bit as innately bizarre as anyone showing up for a cinematic freak show might hope. But the weirdest thing about the movie might be the fact that it at least allows for the possibility that the Evil Genius might be neither of the things contained in that descriptor, but rather somebody whose guileless act may not be that much of a put-on, because she’s dealing with some kind of mysterious damage we can only begin to guess at.

In other words, it’s a movie with some sympathy for the devil, or at least — given the admitted inconclusiveness of its findings — the suggestion that empathy may be possible. Which may be not what you’re expecting walking in to what looks like a hilarious 174-minute takedown. But the intentions of Fielder and his co-director, Lance Oppenheim, are embedded right in that first trailer that set the watching world ablaze. At the scene’s very end, when after a couple of minutes of Holmes smiling and staring earnestly into the narrator’s eyes, with a shaky head that makes it appear as if she’s developed some kind of anxious palsy, it’s revealed that she’s extending her left leg well off the couch to rock her baby. If you were watching that teaser carefully, the filmmakers were carefully signaling the whole movie: vast amounts of IRL comedic shock and awe, tinged with lingering bits of poignance…