DN:FILM The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley
Alex Gibney’s take-down doc about Elizabeth Holmes and her too-good-to-be-true blood-testing company, Theranos, is about a lot, including the magic tricks and confidence games at work in Silicon Valley; the related tech-entrepreneur trope of bluffing until you get a winning hand; the power of self-invention; and the perils of blind infatuation. By the time THE INVENTOR concludes, it hits a “Michael Clayton” groove, bristling with menace and telling a tale that’s familiar in its archetypical strokes but jaw-dropping in its particulars.
Even if you don’t know the story about Holmes—who as a Stanford dropout started what promised to be revolutionary healthcare company lauded by Fortune, The New Yorker and countless other outlets and individuals (star-struck enablers with significant Q ratings who show up in the film include Bill Clinton, George Shultz, Joe Biden and a bunch of other old dudes; older women, not so much)—you know the one about the alluring siren who waylays the willing and casts a devastating spell, eventually to be shown up as evil before she's destroyed. Gibney’s telling has shadowy characters lurking outside buildings; lawyers assaulting whistleblowers; and a grim suicide likely brought on by nefarious associations. Along the way, we see participant after participant who was dazzled by Holmes’ ambition, her presented idealism, her barrier-breaking and her piercing, unblinking blue eyes: These people want to serve on her board of directors, they want to come work for her, they want her to come over for Christmas; but during most of Holmes ascent, her company was feverishly racing to catch up with its unrealized (and, several heads here say, impossible) promises.
Holmes’ models included Steve Jobs, from whom she borrows her sartorial strategy; and Thomas Edison, who, the movie points out, was the first tech practitioner of the “fake it till you make it” ethos that seems to have driven her. By one calculus, she was standing on the shoulders of giants, but had the bad luck of being called before her winning hand came through. Part of the appeal of the doc is its spotlight on the investigative journalists who did the calling. And there’s more than enough secrecy and weirdness presented to suggest that greatest invention in THE INVENTOR was in fact Holmes’ creation of herself, a young woman offering bold, brilliant ideas in a Silicon Valley dominated by men, who justified her fierce protection of secrets and her remarkably vague explanations of Theranos’ essential science as necessary competitive strategies.
The filmmakers gained access to inside-Theranos footage, so there’s a lot of B roll of Holmes walking away from the camera, which serves slyly to illustrate her grand evasion. The longer Gibney’s story unfolds, and the more often he returns to the sucker investors and supporters Holmes left in her wake—onetime-besotted millennials who went to work for Theranos; the reporters who fell hard for her—the more it mesmerizes. Holmes doesn’t come across as a schemer who intended to run a con as much as she does a megalomaniac with delusional ambitions, someone who began with good intention, or at least wildly bold ones, but ended up making damning compromises with the truth, stacking up lies upon lies to cover earlier ones, on a massive scale that produced harrowing outcomes.
Available on HBO Monday, March 18.