The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley (2019)

(On Cable TV, March 2019) I didn’t go in The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley cold—I too had been charmed from afar by the rise of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, taken in by the photogenic Holmes (seriously; people have been talking about how Jennifer Lawrence was going to play her in a film for years!) and the Silicon-Valley-promises of revolutionary health care. Everyone wanted to believe that it was true. But then I saw the implosion of the firm, the ways it had been overhyped and the deliberate attempts at deception and fraud. Apparently, documentarian Alex Gibney (perhaps the best in the business at this time) assumed that most of his viewers came from the same place, because The Inventor does not merely focus on the events surrounding Theranos’ rise and fall, but explores (more interestingly through interviews with ethicist Dan Arialy) the reasons why such a deception could be effective. The Inventor comes closest to excusing Holmes’s behaviour by suggesting that a well-intentioned lie may have ballooned into something much bigger. But the rest of it doesn’t pull any punches in describing the pattern of deliberate deception (with journalists expressing naked anger at the way they’d been duped), and strong-armed legal coercion at their whistleblowers and critics. They emerge from the film as the true heroes, whereas everything about Holmes seems deliberate, and manipulative—even her deep voice, featured without commentary, seems to have been faked. The direction is quite good, with some cute visual puns (such as cacti used as visual metaphors during a discussion of blood-drawing needles) and a good mixture of styles to present what is essentially a talking-head documentary. Gibney draws widely on pictures and video shot during Theranos’ heyday by none other than fellow documentarian Errol Morris. There’s a thicket of issues tackled in The Inventor that may have gotten a bit more play (perhaps most damningly the failure of the gate-keeping older white men that were supposed to be good judges of character when faced with an attractive younger woman—all of the women interviewed in the film are clear-eyed about what was really going on), but the finished documentary remains a satisfying exposé. Also tackled along the way; the built-in duplicity of Silicon Valley, the Steve-Jobs worship as a substitute for real knowledge; and the false god of disruption. But if you’re fascinated by the brazen lying (at a time when the country is having a truth problem at its very top elected offices), dig deeper in the Theranos story—the stuff that’s not in The Inventor is even more mind-boggling … to a point where Gibney may have been too even-handed in his approach to the topic.