The Inventor Out for Blood in Silicon Valley Review
Every bit a quick glance at this week's headlines will remind you — a staggering higher admissions scandal, a wave of indictments in the cases of Paul Manafort and Jussie Smollett — we are living in deeply fraudulent times. Just if there are few people or institutions worthy of our trust anymore, maybe we tin can still trust that, eventually, Alex Gibney volition get around to making sense of it all. Over the grade of his unflagging, indispensable career he has churned out documentaries on Scientology and Enron, Lance Armstrong and Casino Jack — private case studies in a rich and fascinating investigation of the American hustler at piece of work.
Gibney approaches his subjects with the air of an appalled moralist and, increasingly, a grudging connoisseur. His make 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 past the reactions, ranging from unquestioning conventionalities to conflicted loyalty, that they foster among their followers and associates, who in many cases shielded them, at to the lowest degree for a while, from public discovery and censure.
"The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley," Gibney'south latest practice 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 cocky-styled biotech visionary who dropped out of Stanford at historic period 19 and founded a visitor called Theranos, which promised to bring about a revolution in preventive medicine and personal healthcare. Its meridian-secret weapon was a meaty machine called the Edison, which could purportedly run more 200 individual tests from merely 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 plenty to raise more than $400 million and earned her a reputation every bit 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. Merely that was all before the Wall Street Journal's John Carreyrou and other investigative journalists exposed glaring faults in the Edison'southward design and sent the company's $10-billion valuation spiraling down to nothing. Theranos dissolved in 2018, and Holmes and one-time 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 claret the traditional mode, I approached "The Inventor" with great fascination and more a piffling schadenfreude. The movie, for its role, seems both magnetized and repelled past its field of study, a reaction that it will likely share with its audience. Gibney is peradventure overly fond of deploying intense, lingering close-ups of Holmes' face up and peering deep into her unnerving blue eyes ("She didn't blink," a onetime 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 ane.
(HBO)
The movie is thus not entirely immune to the very spell that it seeks to diagnose — namely, the captivating paradigm of Holmes as a strikingly focused and self-assured young woman thriving within the male person-dominated ranks of tech innovation. Just it submits to that spell, ultimately, in order to shatter it from within. Holmes unsurprisingly opted not to participate in the documentary, but her presence is inescapable throughout "The Inventor," due to not only recordings of her many public appearances but also hours of promotional footage that fell into Gibney's easily.
When nosotros see Holmes walking effectually the company's gleaming Palo Alto offices — always wearing black turtlenecks that invited open comparison to i of her idols, Steve Jobs — or revving up her staff with assurances well-nigh the importance of the piece of work they're doing, we are effectively seeing Theranos every bit information technology sought to present itself to the globe. And equally Gibney knows, damning his subjects is ever less efficient, and less effective, than letting them practice it themselves. (He does sneak in a dig at fellow documentarian Errol Morris, whom we see being brought in to flick Holmes, identifying himself as "a fan.")
And and then "The Inventor" becomes less an exposé of white-collar crime than a study in the power of cocky-delusion and corporate megalomania. Gibney's methods are simple but ofttimes brutally effective. He juxtaposes the self-flattering corporate imagery with his own sobering interviews with former Theranos employees, who depict a culture of intense secrecy and paranoia, grotesque technical and upstanding malfeasance, unreliable test results and dangerously malfunctioning equipment. There may be no more nightmarish movie paradigm this twelvemonth than the graphic mock-up of the inside of an Edison paradigm, a Pandora's box of infected needles, broken vials and blood-spattered surfaces.
The proper name of the auto naturally spurs some word of Thomas Edison himself, who, we're reminded, also blurred the roles of innovator and showman, genius and huckster. Merely Holmes successfully convinced a lot of people that she was all genius. She learned to ingratiate herself early with people of wealth and influence, and to ignore naysayers like Dr. Phyllis Gardner, the Stanford medical professor who warned Holmes that what she was proposing — a device that could perform more than 200 extremely precise medical/technical functions in a container small enough to fit on your kitchen counter — was impossible.
It's a pleasure to hear from voices of sanity, similar former Fortune editor Roger Parloff, who speaks with palpable chagrin over having been deceived by Holmes and Theranos. Those voices are among the obvious dividends of "The Inventor," which otherwise offers few fresh insights or revelations beyond what has already been reported. (That includes Carreyrou's 2018 book, "Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup.") Like a lot of Gibney documentaries, it compresses a juicy, complicated story into a smooth, coherent retelling that occasionally glances at that story's deeper implications.
You might exit "The Inventor" thinking nigh the dangers of trying to revolutionize something every bit universal (but also as specific) every bit human health, or wondering why we are and so hands enthralled by the seductive, oftentimes specious linguistic communication of technological disruption. Yous might as well be tempted to read up on Holmes and her continued insistence on seeing herself every bit not the villain just the victim in her ain story, which suggests she might in fact exist the biggest sucker of all.
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'The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley'
Non rated
Running time: ane hour, 58 minutes
Playing: Laemmle's Monica Moving picture Center, Santa Monica; also on HBO beginning March 18
justin.chang@latimes.com | Twitter: @JustinCChang
Source: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-the-inventor-out-for-blood-in-silicon-valley-review-20190314-story.html
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