Review: 'The Inventor' is a coolly appalling portrait of Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos scandal
"As a quick glance at this week’s headlines will remind you — a staggering college admissions scandal, a wave of indictments in the cases of Paul Manafort and Jussie Smollett — we are living in deeply fraudulent times. But if there are few people or institutions worthy of our trust anymore, perhaps we can still trust that, eventually, Alex Gibney will get around to making sense of it all. Over the course of his unflagging, indispensable career he has churned out documentaries on Scientology and Enron, Lance Armstrong and Casino Jack — individual case studies in a rich and fascinating investigation of the American hustler at work.
Gibney
approaches his subjects with the air of an appalled moralist and,
increasingly, a grudging connoisseur. His clean, straightforward style,
which usually combines smart talking heads, slick graphics and reams of
meticulous data, is clearly galvanized by these charismatic individuals,
who are pathological in their dishonesty and riveting in their
chutzpah. And he is equally fascinated by the reactions, ranging from
unquestioning belief to conflicted loyalty, that they foster among their
followers and associates, who in many cases shielded them, at least for
a while, from public discovery and censure.
“The
Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley,” Gibney’s latest exercise in
coolly measured outrage, is an engrossing companion piece to his other
works in this vein. The subject of this HBO documentary is Elizabeth
Holmes, the self-styled biotech visionary who dropped out of Stanford at
age 19 and founded a company called Theranos, which promised to bring
about a revolution in preventive medicine and personal healthcare. Its
top-secret weapon was a compact machine called the Edison, which could
purportedly run more than 200 individual tests from just a few drops of
blood, obtained with just a prick of the finger.
Holmes’
vision of a brave new world — one in which anyone could stop by
Walgreens and obtain a comprehensive, potentially life-saving snapshot
of their health — proved tantalizing enough to raise more than $400
million and earned her a reputation as possibly the greatest inventor
since, well, Thomas Edison. Her investors included Betsy DeVos, Rupert
Murdoch and the Waltons; Henry Kissinger, George Shultz and James Mattis
sat on her board of directors. But that was all before the Wall Street
Journal’s John Carreyrou and other investigative journalists exposed
glaring faults in the Edison’s design and sent the company’s $10-billion
valuation spiraling down to nothing. Theranos dissolved in 2018, and
Holmes and former company president Sunny Balwani were charged with
conspiracy and fraud.
Full disclosure: As the son of a retired medical technologist who spent more than 30 years testing blood the traditional way, I approached “The Inventor” with great fascination and more than a little schadenfreude. The movie, for its part, seems both magnetized and repelled by its subject, a reaction that it will likely share with its audience. Gibney is perhaps overly fond of deploying intense, lingering close-ups of Holmes’ face and peering deep into her unnerving blue eyes (“She didn’t blink,” a former employee recalls). If the eyes are the windows to the soul, “The Inventor” just keeps looking and looking, as though uncertain whether or not its subject has one."
