Documentary

A documentary about a man who will not sit down is an archive film, whatever the poster calls it. Alex Gibney’s Musk runs 225 minutes with a ten-minute intermission, and its subject is present for every one of them without having granted a single interview; the team made, in Gibney’s words at Toronto, so many formal outreaches and received nothing back except remarks on the man’s own platform. So the film was built from what already existed: more than three years of research, archival interviews and a database of the subject’s own quotations, which the cut spends like small change throughout. I want to count the debts before the assets, because the assets are considerable and the debts are the kind this form always runs up. ...

There are two kinds of access documentary. The first kind extracts: it wins its way into the room and leaves with the confession, the slip, the bombshell the trailer has promised, and its grammar is the ambush, the hard question, the camera held a beat too long on a face that has just lied. The second kind supplies. It gives the subject the room, the time and the silence, and then it films what the subject does with them. You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s 174-minute documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, belongs with unusual purity to the second kind, and the reviews, which are rapturous to a degree I distrust on principle, agree on this one point even where they disagree on everything else: nobody in this film is cornered. Holmes and her partner Billy Evans, by The Wolfman Cometh’s account, regularly volunteer information Fielder was not seeking. Enough rope, patiently supplied. ...