THE ACTRESS MEETS HER SUBJECT'S FOOTAGE
Amanda Seyfried won an Emmy for playing Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout. In Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's new documentary, Seyfried watches footage involving the actual Holmes, including Holmes encountering that TV performance. The layers of imitation become hard to count before anybody even changes costume.
The film begins with the filmmakers recording Holmes in the last stretch before prison, then turns toward things the cameras could not witness. Fielder brings Seyfried into the process as someone who already spent months constructing a version of this woman.
A REENACTMENT OF WHAT NOBODY COULD FILM
Seyfried resumes the role for dramatizations of private conversations and a prison visit that could not be recorded. Christopher Abbott plays Holmes's partner Billy Evans in these reconstructed scenes. The scripts depend on the filmmakers' recollections and choices; a polished recreation is not a surveillance tape.
That is the unnerving part. An actress can make a disputed memory feel more concrete than an honest admission that the camera was absent. The documentary exposes that trick while performing it.
EMMA STONE'S UNEXPECTED ROLE
According to Oppenheim's account reported by TheWrap, Emma Stone helped connect the directors with Seyfried. At first they wanted her reaction to the footage. Seyfried's willingness to play Holmes again changed the movie's form.
There is a magnificent joke hiding in this casting chain. Hollywood created a substitute Elizabeth Holmes. The real Holmes entered a documentary about her own public image. Then the substitute was called back to explain the parts reality failed to record. This may be the first film in which the reenactment should be credited as a witness for the prosecution and the defense.