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TIt is a widespread belief that the United States is a place where a person of modest means can make his way to the highest levels of power by mere courage. This myth remains stable, despite many punctuations such as the Fyre Festival, the Trump presidency and the scandal of college admissions this week. In Alex Gibney's most recent documentary, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, the film rises again thanks to the incredible story of Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos scandal. It's the story of a woman who managed to get millions of dollars for a blood test device that did not exist, a clbadic story of relationships that matter more than knowledge. He has inspired an award-winning book, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley start-up by John Carreyrou, and should inspire an Oscar-starring biopic starring Jennifer Lawrence.
But unfortunately, Gibney finds himself unable to show why Holmes was such a convincing figure. Instead, the viewer is lost in an endless labyrinth of dry reenactments and images of Theranos' promos and interviews. There are fantastic benefits, like the first investor Bill Draper, who does not believe that being a family friend with Holmes has nothing to do with his choice of financing Theranos, but nothing is comparable to a thesis. We are overwhelmed with data, often awkwardly transmitted. In one scene, Gibney superimposes an article on Theranos on lab stills, a completely non-cinematic way to share information on which the film comes back again and again.
Therefore, even if Holmes flies over the film, we learn very little about it. As for her youth, she told us that she was reading Moby Dick and admiring Thomas Edison, probably to explain Gibney's argument that she was an Icarus who was turning for an inaccessible, but we wonder why we need to see the first film shot by Edison. The two-hour documentary focuses on Holmes's personalization of clbad status, Silicon Valley poverty, and the incompetence of the federal government regulators, but he is unable to tell us more. on these topics in detail. This nebulous intention makes you feel that you do not understand the whole story.
In Gibney's previous films, such as Taxi to the Dark Side and Enron: the smartest men in the room, he was able to provide in-depth badysis as well as compelling visuals that contributed to the stories of corruption government. With this latest image, Gibney seems unable to find images corresponding to the story that he wants to tell. He uses the CGI recreation and archive images as a kind of crutch, but doing so obscures the problem. Holmes is impossible to differentiate from a hundred TED Talk abusers. Therefore, providing the public with images of her TED Talks does not make her more or less friendly, she just becomes a head talking in an ocean of talking heads. Once we are about to show that Theranos is a lie, we do not necessarily know why it is a lie that holds our attention.
While Holmes is a rather laconic and reserved character, it would have been possible for Gibney to build a more thoughtful portrait of her. Instead of making stupid comparisons with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, he could have used more recent Silicon Valley programs, such as the startup Juicero, as vital jewels for Theranos. Instead, it combines fuzzy badysis with literal textual representation, and when we see e-mails and articles read for us many times about prodigious music, the effect is more soporific than exciting. Towards the middle of the film, he shows us Errol Morris doing an advertisement for Holmes – a little less subtle in the major documentary – and yet we would almost like a filmmaker like Morris, who made a career scrambling the lines between reality and fiction, had approached this project. Better a provocative representation of the truth, then this boring litany of facts.
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