Instead, Holmes presents herself as a beige cashmere-clad mother of two with messy hair who always has a baby in her arms. She is not Elizabeth Holme
Instead, Holmes presents herself as a beige cashmere-clad mother of two with messy hair who always has a baby in her arms. She is not Elizabeth Holmes, tech founder and cultural villain, she is Liz or Lizzie, a human, a victim—of public perception, of her ex boyfriend, or the culture. And a woman forced to trade her cozy home for a prison cell.
When Fielder mentions to Holmes that he feels insecure about the fact that he is not an expert on science, and he wonders if Evans and Holmes may rely on this to manipulate him or the narrative, she assures him that “the point of this is not to litigate the science,” that the film they’re making “is a human story.” It’s Holmes’s style, or the seemingly deliberate lack thereof, that does much of the bulky lifting in this regard.
Holmes is, at all times, self-fashioning as vulnerable. She cries and blushes and wears her emotions on her skin. Even when she is scanned to make an AI hologram of herself for Evans to show their children while she is away, she is at a state of domestic dishevelment.
It is all incredibly persuasive and does not come across as part of her deception until the final hour of the film when Seyfried joins in on Fielder’s adventure.
Seyfried’s reenactments of Holmes’s conversations with Fielder in You Can See Everything become crucial to the narrative of the film. Not because they fill in gaps in the story—at the heart of this film is the idea that neither Holmes and Evans nor Fielder, and by extension Seyfried, are reliable narrators—but because they affirm that Holmes, not just as she’s seen in The Dropout, but as the earnest, doting mother, is a character that she, too, can easily play.
You Can See Everything forces viewers to wade through layers of deception. But some of Holmes’s tells are worn on her sleeve.
Seyfried becomes both witness and participant in this story, but her acting illuminates a elementary idea: that Liz Holmes, as she presents herself to Fielder, as an adoring mother and as a doting wife, is yet another persona Holmes is adopting, this time in her crusade to prove her innocence. You Can See Everything does humanize her, but perhaps not how she intended. It suggests that we can’t trust her, and that like many humans, she does tell lies, perhaps even to herself, which is a most human quality after all.
