Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s You Can See Everything is one of the greatest documentaries of all time. I hate to use such hyperbole for a film I’ve only recently seen just once, but I went in with high expectations after hearing similar praise and was still surprised at how good it is. Of course, “one of the greatest documentaries of all time” isn’t that specific. One out of how many? One of a hundred? Relative to the number of documentaries released in 130 years, that’s still pretty good. I would never say any film is the greatest of all time. Maybe I’d tell people You Can See Everything is the greatest in 50 years to get them to see it, even if I don’t know if I believe it.
Much of You Can See Everything is about semantics. The documentary is partly a profile of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes (previously the subject of Alex Gibney’s The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley) in the weeks leading up to the start of her prison sentence for wire fraud. She maintains that she’s innocent, arguing that the whole thing has been a misunderstanding because a claim she made about her blood-testing Edison machines was interpreted differently than what she meant by it. Fielder shows Holmes and her husband, Billy Evans, the Abbott and Costello comedy routine “Who’s on First?” (the greatest comedy routine of all time) for comparison. The documentary’s title, which comes from Holmes’s assurance of access to the filmmakers, is another example of how words can have more than one meaning.
You Can See Everything is also about itself — not a rarity with documentaries, but this one goes above and beyond the norm with its meta-ness. For example, and I’m trying not to spoil anything, there is an incredibly intertextual moment in the film when someone watches footage of another person watching footage of a dramatization, and it’s a kind of unraveling of the layers of truth, personality, and performance that Fielder and Oppenheim are working with. They’re also clearly concerned with the nature of documentary and cinema as a whole, as evidenced by one cut in the film where a word spoken by Holmes could be easily misinterpreted by the editing. But not in a way that is misconstrued, manipulative, or deceptive by the filmmakers. It’s more of an edit that stresses the conundrum of the word in its context and circumstance.
I am being vague because it’s best to go into You Can See Everything without knowing much other than that Fielder, best known for his comedic nonfiction shows Nathan for You and The Rehearsal, is on screen for much of the film. The first half involves him living in Holmes and Evans’s guest house while the production films their daily lives and interrogates them and family members about Holmes’s case. The second half continues without much physical involvement from Holmes, after she begins her prison sentence and can no longer be filmed, and deals with how the filmmakers overcome that obstacle. I don’t think it’s necessarily groundbreaking in the idea of what happens next, but the film’s execution of the idea is really spectacular.
All I can say is that as the film went on, I thought this might be what a documentary by Charlie Kaufman might look like. It’s the most entertainingly complex and convoluted documentary involving fraud since the Orson Welles classic F for Fake, though I should note that you needn’t expect any trickery here. The secretive nature of the film leading up to its release isn’t due to some plot twist, punchline, or ta-da moment. It’s neither a Catfish nor a Jinx nor even a subtle Imposter-type stunner. I’d compare it more to Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation due to its focus on words taken differently. While You Can See Everything is a documentary for the ages, it’s also a perfect film for the times we’re living in, with so much here that’s relevant to the gaslighting and constant clarifying of intended meanings from the government.
I used to think that merry pranksters (lowercase) like your Sacha Baron Cohens and your Nathan Fielders achieved very little as far as progress. They could disrupt, beyond minor situational stunts and confrontations, as we saw back with the Yippies and more recently with Anonymous. But they were still ultimately just amusing distractions. Then, this year, Fielder went and inspired an aviation industry law through his actions and questions raised in Season 2 of his show The Rehearsal. Like Errol Morris’s The Unknown Known, though, You Can See Everything shows us how impenetrable some subjects in politics and business can be. They’re the real tricksters of the world, and they might have the last laugh as the rest of us are just left stunned.