The following story is co-published with Freddie deBoer’s Substack .

Nobody, it seems, can say exactly what happens in “You Can See Everything.” Sometimes this is presented as a way to preserve the experience for the viewer; before discussing the subject or the running time, critic after critic opens their review of Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s Elizabeth Holmes documentary with a very same-y kind of throat-clearing: I don’t want to spoil it, it’s impossible to describe, you’ll never believe who turns up, go in cold. The movie premiered at Telluride in a surprise, secret, phone-free screening, and the critics who were there have been making sure you know how cool it was to be among the elect ever since. Since the movie’s opening, the film has driven discourse to a degree never before achieved by a film documentary, farming thousands of positive reviews and an an immense amount of awards buzz. The result is a perfect Tomatometer rating, a Metacritic score in the high 90s and a level of reverence that’s usually reserved for films made by our most celebrated auteurs. And, indeed, I think from here on out both Fielder and Oppenheim will find themselves in that category.

I … enjoyed it. There’s a lot of weird, interesting, provocative stuff in it. The first stretch of the movie, in which Fielder more or less moves into the Del Mar rental with Holmes and her partner Billy Evans as she spends her last free weeks before jail, is funny and provocative in the way Fielder is always funny and provocative. He lurks, simultaneously hiding and attracting others toward him, like one of those weird deep sea fish with a bioluminescent lure on their heads. He asks questions nobody else would ask Holmes — though, to be clear, this is true both because other people would be too polite but because other people would also find them vulgar to ask of a woman who genuinely risked people’s lives. There’s a lot of prodding at the documentary’s subject, feeling out her various forms of weirdness. Fielder plays Holmes the Abbott & Costello “Who’s on First?” bit to see whether she laughs; the point, of course, is provoking the ensuing awkwardness, which has been Fielder’s stock in trade for a long time. Then, about 90 minutes in, Holmes reports to prison, and it’s here where the movie loses me both on an ethical level but also in terms of pure enjoyment. The movie turns into something else entirely, a series of reenactments, reexaminations of footage we’ve already just watched, and [yes yes spoilers spoilers blah blah] Amanda Seyfried reprising her role from “The Dropout” and getting into it with Evans over wine. This pivot is definitely clever. Fielder is never not clever. But that turning point is also where the film starts repetitively mistaking cleverness for depth, and the critics have followed it right over the waterfall. What we’re left with is a movie that (like everything Fielder does) is ultimately all about him and a critical reception that’s derived from his expert manipulation of the class of people who write about movies.

The film has driven discourse to a degree never before achieved by a film documentary.

Strip away the trappings and what the movie actually has to say is fairly conventional 21st century techno ambiguity stuff: you cannot fully know another person; footage can be manipulated and misrepresented; a documentary is a constructed object, no less than a work of fiction; the filmmaker’s presence changes what they film. All of this is true and none of it is particularly novel or constructive at this point. Errol Morris was making these points in the 1980s. Orson Welles made them with more wit, in less than half the time, in “F for Fake,” a comparison that some viewers have made in praise of “You Can See Everything” but which seems pretty damning of the new movie to me. For one thing, Welles’ jovial blowhard genius persona is much better suited to the subject matter, as Fielder’s various levels of irony don’t achieve quite what Welles’ deserved self-regard does. But there’s also my tedious, no doubt unsophisticated feeling that a movie like this should say something, something specific, that goes beyond broad chin-stroking. Morris and Welles used the instability of truth to get somewhere in particular; Fielder and Oppenheim arrive at the instability of truth and expect that to be enough. “Here it is!” they say. And the plaudits pile up.

And, Jesus Christ, this thing is 174 minutes long. I would love to hear a case for the runtime that isn’t circular. The usual defense, that Fielder has to give his subjects room to answer and react (stretching the runtime), describes the first half reasonably well, I guess. But the backstretch is a series of variations on one move, the reveal that what we saw was not what we thought we saw, repeated until the reveal is the only thing left. Again, for three hours. A gimmick isn’t bad for being a gimmick, mind you. (“F for Fake” has one that is obvious and a little annoying but still useful.) The trouble with gimmicks is that they rely on novelty and “You Can See Everything” just keeps doing the same shtick over and over again. Meanwhile the hotly debated question of whether Elizabeth Holmes should be pitied or reviled isn’t particularly interesting to me, in part because everyone seems to be having it in the abstract — the central thing to understand is that she has actually gone to actual prison, and for years, so we don’t need to argue about that abstraction. Why do people keep sending salvos in that abstract debate, despite the fact of her preexisting formal legal punishment? Because the movie doesn’t give you much of anything to debate itself. It’s too enamored with being arch.

So why the rapture? Well, like I said, I think it’s deeply entertaining, particularly before it wears out its welcome; Holmes is a bizarre character, her husband is exactly the kind of odd-duck huckster the documentary format thrives on, and Fielder is a genuinely magnetic presence. The problem is that, like Fielder’s show “The Rehearsal,” our critical caste insists on talking about this movie not as a funny, entertaining curio, but as a profound statement of our times. Why? I suspect the answer has less to do with the film itself than with the nature of people paid to write about films. I think the movie is very sophisticated, chic critic bait.

Consider what this movie offers a professional critic. For one thing, the movie itself is about interpretation and begs to be interpreted. A movie with the thesis that nothing we see onscreen can be taken at face value is a film that requires a decoder — and of course our decoders are critics, recappers, essayists, YouTube monologists, #content creators. Every reviewer who says that “You Can See Everything” is “a hall of mirrors” is really bragging that they know their way through the labyrinth. After all, the movie’s concerns are the concerns of the professional analyst: Critics are media people who spend their lives thinking about media, and so a documentary about the nature of documentaries flatters that preoccupation the way a novel about a novelist flatters certain professional readers. And, as suggested above, the movie offers a heightened version of the pleasure of being invited to advance screenings. “Read nothing, avoid spoilers, just get to the theater, trust me on this!” isn’t criticism; it’s an insidery class signal, one that confers status on the person saying it the status of having already seen the cool new thing, with unusually high stakes. The Telluride stunt was engineered for precisely this, and it worked beautifully. It doesn’t hurt that the reviewers writing that sort of thing surely know much of the audience will inevitably learn more about the movie than they should, prior to watching, because most people don’t get to go to the Telluride Film Festival.

I wouldn’t mind if the final product was a little less self-impressed.

And the movie certainly hands the audience the villain they already wanted. Holmes ends up murky and half-sympathetic; Billy Evans, the fit, rich, WASPy partner — who cut a back-end deal with A24 that Holmes apparently didn’t know about — ends up arguing with a movie star about Charlie Kirk, becoming the bad guy, and critics have cheerfully crowned him one of the year’s great villains. Maybe he earns it. But it’s a very tidy setup, isn’t it? The people who write about movies like this are overwhelmingly going to be inclined against Evans, and the movie’s audience will largely be bent it that direction too. I can’t help but notice how comfortable the moral architecture of it all is, how much moral convenience is baked into the whole thing. The famous (woman) fraudster receives ambiguity and so at least the possibility of grace; the Republican boyfriend gets only contempt. He probably deserves it, as a human being. But as the subject of a movie, his portrayal is cartoonish enough that it undermines the very indeterminacy that the film is so proud of. A version of this documentary that genuinely unsettled its audience (say, by suggesting some sympathy for the dickhead husband) would be harder to enjoy; the one we got, for most of the presumed audience, is effortless in that way. And that’s what I like least, the sense that the filmmakers are very impressed with their own willingness to not come to pat conclusions while making a dull morality play.

None of this would matter much if the movie were being praised as what it is — a funny, inventive, overextended stunt by a comedian with a real gift for discomfort. That movie deserves an audience. But the reviews are describing a philosophical masterwork, one praised for its inventiveness (despite being derivative) and ambiguity (despite being morally pat). Look, it’s fun. I’m glad it exists. It succeeds in being quite entertaining despite being so gratingly long. But there’s something missing in the movie and, I feel strongly, something mannered and false in how it’s being discussed, a real critical dedication to finding depths that I’m not sure are really there. Meanwhile the critical takes seem to be based on fundamentally moral objections, which are valid but mostly boring. Some have suggested that all the epistemology talk was over-intellectualized nonsense draped over a portrait of two con artists. That may be so, but I wouldn’t mind if the final product was a little less self-impressed and a little more willing to be uncomfortable itself rather than merely inspiring discomfort in the audience.

The title, which has been dissected ten thousand times in overwrought essays, promises that you can see everything. That title has helped the movie garner a reputation for being about The Way We Live Now. We’re living in a period in which everyone can see everything, an era of relentless mutual surveillance, which helps make cases of fraud like Theranos that much more inexplicable. And, you know, I do think this documentary is very much of its time. I just also think that it’s doing less than people think, earning tons of Oscar buzz based on projections of meaning and general affection for Fielder. What you can actually see, if you look at the reception rather than the film, is a critical class watching a movie built to flatter their interests and lauding it for being challenging.

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