In our newfound cultural fascination with scammers, Elizabeth Holmes is this spring’s belle of the ball. She’s the subject of a mega-popular crime podcast, Jennifer Lawrence is set to portray her on the big screen, and two competing documentaries about her and her failed startup, Theranos, debut this month. HBO‘s offering, “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley” by “Going Clear” documentarian Alex Gibney, is a straightforward but entertaining tale that will keep both newcomers and Holmes enthusiasts enthralled.
For those of you who don’t know the Holmes/Theranos basics, a rundown: Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford at 20 to found Theranos, a medical technology start-up based in Silicon Valley that claimed to produce machines that could perform hundreds of tests on one drop of blood. Despite a number of big-time political backers and billions of investment dollars, the company eventually closed last September after an investigation by The Wall Street Journal’s John Carreyrou alleged Theranos had never successfully produced such technology and had, therefore, lied to patients and investors. Holmes and former company president Sunny Balwani are now facing indictments from the federal government, and Holmes has gone from the world’s youngest female self-made billionaire to a reviled fraud, but also equally, a strangely beloved true crime icon for those fascinated with such thing.
And while “The Inventor” undoubtedly debuts this month in part due to Holmes’s meteoric pop cultural relevance, that relevance is perhaps the doc’s greatest downfall. Obsessive followers of the Theranos saga will likely tune into the doc having read John Carreyrou’s breakout book, “Bad Blood;” listened to ABC’s “The Dropout” podcast; or watched ABC’s documentary of the same name— if not having gluttonously imbibed all three like newborn vampires. It’s hard to tap this story for new information. Gibney is working with the same crazy story and players like everybody else, so the success of “The Inventor” is all down to how he and his team present the Theranos tale.
Luckily, if anyone knows how to make an entertaining documentary based on outstanding long-form journalism, it’s Alex Gibney. Best known for the Academy Award-winning “Taxi To The Dark Side,” Academy nominated, “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” and 2013’s Emmy-winning, “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief,” based on the eponymous book by Lawrence Wright, Gibney is especially skilled at presenting outlandish, real-life stories cleanly and without agenda. “The Inventor” presents the what and how of Holmes’s alleged fraud more than its why. How many people did she promise to help with Theranos technology, and how many people did she hurt instead? How did she fool journalists into writing glowing cover stories about her?
That meta-look at the reporting that both fueled and unfurled Theranos is one of the documentary’s best assets. Journalists Ken Auletta and Roger Parloff, who wrote profiles about Holmes, give interviews, as well as the Wall Street Journal’s Carreyrou himself. It’s especially enthralling to be able to actually see those first two men express their awe and bewilderment in the face of Holmes’s betrayal.
Though disappointingly lacking in any real insight into Holmes’s background, “The Inventor” also makes some intriguing connections between Holmes and Thomas Edison, for whom she named her blood testing device. If you’re wondering how that’s possible, given Edison was a real inventor and not a conman — boy, do I and Alex Gibney have news for you! Gibney postulates that, unlike the fully-formed mythical Edison, Elizabeth Holmes is a forever inchoate American legend, equally intriguing and scorn-worthy for her discontinuity.
With a popular subject, and some downright corny visual devices, “The Inventor” doesn’t knock it out of the park as neatly as some of Gibney’s other works. Still, it’s a worthwhile and damn entertaining addition to the developing Elizabeth Holmes canon that makes up for its flaws with undeniable watchability. This documentary is so compelling it makes two hours feel like 45 minutes— though, of course, that might leave you feeling like it’s missing something deeper and darker and perhaps a psychological explanation behind why grifters gotta grift so far out on the edge of getting caught that’s still to come. [B]
“The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley” premieres March 18 on HBO.
