You Can See Everything

 Amanda Seyfried       

Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's You Can See Everything is, ostensibly, a documentary about the now imprisoned Theranos executive Elizabeth Holmes. The filmmakers were invited to film Holmes, her husband, and two small children in a beachside house they rented in San Diego for the last month or so before Holmes was scheduled to begin her sentence. Mr. Fielder appears onscreen throughout as the couples' interlocutor. I would argue that we learn more about his character than that of the shifty couple. Since I think objectivity in film documentary is a crock, and has been since Nanook waved at Robert Flaherty, Mr. Fielder's presence makes this a more personal picture than the usual talking head fests. The filmmakers were smart enough to know that seeking truth in such a complex and thorny case as this is foolhardy, especially when you are dealing with such slippery customers as Ms. Holmes and her hubby. However, the two are so cluelessly cocooned in their delusional bubble that they help make You Can See Everything the funniest American comedy of 2026. The ellipses of Ms. Holmes' non-answers provide perfect comic beats.

I watched the film at a sold out matinee and and was amazed at the number of gasps, guffaws, and belly laughs the picture elicited. The film is visually monotonous, mostly enormous close-ups of faces, but I and the rest of the audience were largely riveted. The filmmakers seem at sea when Ms Holmes enters the hoosegow, but an entertaining fiction saves the project. Amanda Seyfried, who played Ms. Holmes in a Hulu movie, and Christopher Abbott are enlisted to play versions of Holmes and mate. A pre-filming meeting that displays the dynamics between the couple is reenacted, as is a prison visitation resulting in a documentary film that plays around with the form. You Can See Everything does not attempt to give us facts in a Joe Friday fashion, but gives us much to chew and ruminate on. 

Scenes from a Marriage

Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann

In certain cases, I have reserved a few works of art to contemplate in my dotage. I just read Proust for the first time and was underwhelmed. He reminded me of Virginia Woolf in his self-absorption. There are always a few Dorothy Dunnett and Tom Sharpe novels that I am saving for my deathbed because I love their prose so. Scenes from a Marriage was in this category partially because I am a recovering Bergmaniac. When the shortened film version was released in the US in 1974, I was deep in the throes of my adoration of the Swedish Ubermensch. I grew up in Baltimore where we were able to receive Washington D. C. stations if we pointed the rabbit eared antenna a certain way. WETA ran a series of Bergman films from the Janus collection with commentary from the young Roger Ebert and I was hooked. I was able to see everything from Summer with Monika through Winter Light as a teen and it helped me glom onto cinema as an art form. Scenes from a Marriage had gotten huzzahs from the American critics, but, being the contrary budding aesthete I was, I vowed to wait and view the real deal.

It was worth the wait. The six part (or scenes), 297 minute 1973 television series has a breadth of vision that eclipses the film version which omits two hours of footage. The length of the series opens up our understanding of Marianne (Liv Ullmann) and Johan (Erland Josephson), the married and then divorced but always a couple the film chronicles. The series was filmed in color by Sven Nykvist, but the baroque expressionism of Cries and Whispers (an alleged masterpiece I find over wrought) has been discarded. Scenes from a Marriage recalls The Rite, also lensed by Nykvist, in that it is a chamber play, almost entirely shot in interiors. What exteriors that exist in the series usually show the characters tearing around the countryside in a Volvo. They are usually there for a reason, though. Bergman repeats a shot of a parked vehicle at the couple's summer cottage to express what has been lost in the passage of time.  The first instance is when Johan is telling Marianne that he is leaving her. The second is when the couple, now divorced and married to unseen others, arrive at the cottage to rekindle their romance. They are able to do so, but only by leaving that cottage and escaping the ghosts of the past.

The majority of the series focuses on interior duologues between Johan and Marianne. These scenes start out in long shot, establishing the perimeter of the field of marital combat, but they always end in tight close-ups. Sometimes of someone in anguish, usually Marianne, but more often with the couple having found a rapprochement, cuddling. There are a lot enormous close-ups, like the one above, of the couple together as a unit, her yin to his yang as it were. Johan is the rational male side, more self centered and sarcastic. Marianne is the masochistic female empath. As has been pointed out, Bergman's sympathies lie with the distaff side even though Josephson's character, as in After the Rehearsal, can be looked at as a Bergman stand-in. However, I detect glimpses of hope within the usual Bergman battle of the sexes. We get plenty of the hell is other people schtick, particularly in the dinner party with Bibi Andersson and Jan Malmsjo, and Ibsen and Strindberg get the usual shout-outs, but the protagonists display personal growth. Johan becomes a little more empathic or "softer" as Marianne puts it and Marianne becomes more independent and sure of herself.

Ms. Ullmann's performance is one of the greatest of the last century, but the care and the skill of the other performers is not far behind. Wench Foss, Norwegian like Ms. Ullmann, is especially memorable as Marianne's mother in a scene snipped from the film version. The scene, in which Marianne blithely tells her mother that she will not be attending her father's interment, is a signpost of Marianne liberating herself from the rituals and unspoken rules of the previous generation. Liberation is not a concept generally found in the claustrophobic world of Herr Bergman, but it is there in Scenes from a Marriage.

Virginia City

Guinn Williams, Alan Hale Sr., and Errol Flynn

Michael Curtiz's Virginia City is an amiable enough Errol Flynn vehicle, but it is also the least interesting Flynn/Curtiz collaboration Warner Brothers released in 1940, the others being Santa Fe Trail and The Sea Hawk. Flynn is a Yankee Captain during the Civil War who we first view attempting to break out of the infamous Libby prison in Richmond. The commandant of that prison is Randolph Scott who is improbably roped into a plot, by dancehall gal/spy Mildred Hopkins, to move five million dollars in gold from the titular town east in order to prop up a tottering Confederacy. After busting out of the hoosegow, Flynn is tabbed to thwart the rebel plan. A troupe of banditos, headed by a mustachioed Humphrey Bogart, lurks on the periphery threatening mischief at every step.

I'm not referring to the characters in this picture because they hardly exist. The flick has a cobbled together feel with various writers contributing different elements to the formulaic stew. There is a pinch of Gone With The Wind and more than a dollop of Stagecoach. Flynn gets to display his good natured dash, but other familiar elements lack brio. Guinn Williams and Alan Hale are along to provide comic relief as Flynn's cohorts, but the material they are given is feeble. Curtiz's gifts did not include comic raffishness. His exterior scenes lack the dynamism and thematic integration employed by Walsh and Ford, though the scenic vistas, mostly in Arizona, are gorgeous. The most memorable sequences are interior: the Sazerac dancehall where Ms. Hopkins plies her trades and the opening sequences inside and below Libby prison.

Humphrey Bogart

The weakest and most embarrassing element of the film is Bogart's performance as a Mexican bad man. It is among the more ludicrous miscastings in Hollywood history, right up there with Bogart's turn as a vampire in The Return of Doctor X, but it belies the fact that Bogie had not reached the status of an A player, yet. It did not have to be since Bogart was playing a real figure, the outlaw John Murrell, who was, in fact, not a Mexican. Of course, the real Murell died in 1844, but Virginia City is not encumbered by historic fact. I rolled my eyes when a Virginia City town crier announces the simultaneous fall of Southern strongholds Vicksburg and Atlanta; events that were separated by some fourteen months. What is more objectionable than the picture's slipshod treatment of history is its even-handedness to the Union and Rebel cause; a sop to the Southern box-office. Flynn and Scott are both honorable dudes who are just staying true to their cause. Slavery is unmentioned. The ulterior motive for this is that, two years before Pearl Harbor, Hollywood wanted to play down partisan and regional divisions in the US to cement the unity needed to combat the Axis menace.

There are some things I like about the flick. Hopkins and Scott were both Southerners and their accents are nicely relaxed. Compare them to Ward Bond who appears as a Confederate soldier early on. Bond's efforts aren't bad, but pales besides the real things. The songs Hopkins is saddled with are weak, even Dietrich would have flailed with them, but she is a trouper. I kind of like Flynn putting the moves on an older woman for once instead of jailbait like Olivia de Havilland, as was his wont in his surreal life.