Nathan Fielder’s new movie returns to a corridor of mirrors the place efficiency and actuality turn out to be so intertwined it’s unattainable to disentangle them.
Photograph: A24
Spoilers observe for You Can See All the pieces.
Anybody who’s seen The Rehearsal is aware of Nathan Fielder is an unusually self-insertive documentarian, one prepared to make use of atypical strategies to current a truthful illustration of his topic. In season two, he turns into fixated on Captain Sully Sullenberger, positive that if he can recreate the precise expertise of Sully’s childhood, he can determine the tiny, particular experiences that gave the pilot the fortitude to land his airplane on the Hudson River. Fielder’s new documentary with Lance Oppenheim, You Can See All the pieces, leans on the identical technique. If Fielder can completely recreate Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, he can interrogate her even in her absence. He can press her on his basic query — not concerning the crimes she dedicated however what she believes about herself. Inside this context, You Can See All the pieces seems to be like the most recent installment in a challenge Fielder’s been engaged on for years. He loves oddities and inexplicable human extremes. He’s fascinated by the opacity of human communication. He loves hooking onto a sophisticated, intractable thriller and figuring out some missed piece of proof to clarify it, however he does so within the service of his major space of curiosity. Fielder’s fundamental character is all the time himself.
Though Holmes is the central determine of the primary half of the movie, as soon as she is is incarcerated, Fielder asks Amanda Seyfried, who portrayed Holmes within the Hulu collection The Dropout, to reenact interactions and conversations. In her function as Holmes’s stand-in, Seyfried additionally turns into considered one of Fielder’s interview topics. What does she take into consideration Holmes and her relationship together with her accomplice, Billy Evans? The place do Seyfried’s sympathies lie? Seyfried’s function in YCSE creates the identical hall-of-mirrors expertise Fielder is consistently aiming for in The Rehearsal, the place efficiency and actuality turn out to be so intertwined it’s unattainable to disentangle them from one another. Seyfried begins as a prepared and curious artistic accomplice, fortunately studying the transcripts Fielder has given her to recreate the scenes he was not in a position to document on digital camera. However by the top of the movie, Seyfried begins pushing Fielder on his allegiances and assumptions. Is he positive he hasn’t left something out of those transcripts?, she asks him. Is he attempting to guard Holmes?
That flip, the place Seyfried begins questioning Fielder’s attachment, arrives within the final half-hour of YCSE’s three-hour run time and performs like a mic drop. Fielder insists he’s attempting to be as goal as doable and has been maintaining his feelings out of it. Seyfried is skeptical. Has Holmes persuaded Fielder to miss all of the proof of her fraud? Has he been hoodwinked by the efficiency of devotion between Holmes and Evans? The ultimate scene is an admission: Holmes and Fielder swimming within the ocean, laughing and pulling one another by way of the waves although he beforehand insisted he was too scared to ever swim in open water. He’s been compromised. Or maybe he’s aware sufficient of his personal potential sympathy for her that he’s hidden this scene on the finish as a result of he is aware of the way it will look when it lastly arrives. She acquired him, too, however perhaps by acknowledging his bias he may also neutralize it.
Viewers of The Rehearsal will acknowledge this flip. In each seasons, Fielder begins by asking broad questions on points outdoors of himself: Can folks put together completely for unpredictable emotional experiences? What occurs inside somebody’s mind within the split-second second of a life-or-death choice? And in every installment, Fielder shortly turns into his personal topic. He needs to check the rehearsal course of on a really difficult future consequence by serving to a lady named Angela “rehearse” motherhood, solely to shortly reveal that he, too, want to find out how being a father would really feel. He turns into the topic of that rehearsal, “parenting” a number of little one actors at totally different ages and with totally different processes to discover their attachment to him and vice versa. In season two, his give attention to co-pilot communications turns into an elaborate exploration of his personal difficulties speaking with different folks. All of it’s efficiency; Fielder intentionally foregrounds his sense of dislocation and confusion, typically utilizing fastidiously written voice-over to relate his internal turmoil. However the model of Fielder who seems onscreen additionally got here from someplace inside Fielder, no matter how scripted or studied it was. When does the efficiency of authenticity turn out to be so thorough it’s simply authenticity?
The concepts floating by way of You Can See All the pieces have direct corollaries to the concepts Fielder performs with in The Rehearsal. His obsession with whether or not Holmes understands that different folks didn’t interpret her use of the phrase can or whether or not she grasps the joke in “Who’s on First?” are reiterations of his communication hang-ups in season two. His reverence for her motherhood — which the movie avoids asking her about, substituting dialogue with infinite visuals of her breastfeeding and swinging her kids by way of the waves — echoes the themes of season one. However principally, The Rehearsal haunts You Can See All the pieces within the film’s avoidance of participating with Holmes on a lot of the pertinent scientific and authorized information of her case. Simply as in his examination of Captain Sully or his exploration of parenting or an episode about cloned puppies, Fielder is uninterested within the technical realities or the concrete, simply provable information. They’re the belongings you skim to get to the extra attention-grabbing intangibles: Who is that this particular person, actually? What made them that method? After which, inevitably: What does this imply for me, Nathan Fielder?
Fielder is basically excited about his personal response to Holmes and the way a lot the particular person he’s taking a look at so intently is a mirrored image of himself. He positions himself as each a possible Holmes sufferer, swayed by her sincerity, and as a Holmes doppelganger, staring into somebody’s eyes, insisting he’s simply stating the information, passionate and extremely seen but additionally falling again on some extent of canopy. (Evans supplies cowl for Holmes; Oppenheim, as co-director, covers for Fielder by stopping him from being the only authorial voice.)
Realizing The Rehearsal adjustments the expertise of You Can See All the pieces. That final scene, the place Fielder swims fortunately with Holmes, seems to be like a stolen secret second between them, and its placement on the finish of the movie offers it the heft of revelation. But it surely’s additionally filmed by Oppenheim, in a shot little doubt fastidiously orchestrated to provide them good framing and lighting, and it’s simply as a lot part of his efficiency as anything has been. A lot of the film appears to be a movie about Elizabeth Holmes, however the final scene is the second it absolutely turns into the Nathan Fielder challenge it’s been all alongside: a challenge about Nathan Fielder.
Join the Vulture Every day
An leisure publication for the pop-culture obsessed.
Vox Media, LLC Phrases and Privateness Discover