Amanda Seyfried has gone all-in to play the part of fallen Silicon Valley CEO Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout (Disney+, from Thursday), opting for the kind of immersive performance that is as hungry for awards as Nicole Kidman’s prosthetic nose. By all accounts, the real Holmes was a shapeshifter, adjusting her voice and her look as her star rose, and Seyfried embraces every bit of that transformation, from the scruffy 19-year-old in business-suit cosplay to the full face of slap and infamous black polo neck. Just as Dopesick dated its action by its characters’ hairstyles, this does it with eyeliner. The thicker it is, the closer we are to the moment Arthur Fleck becomes the Joker.
Holmes was once the youngest female, self-made billionaire in the US. She was on magazine covers, touted as the next Steve Jobs, whom she idolised, and her company, Theranos, promised to transform medicine by allowing blood tests for a plethora of ailments to be carried out with a single drop of blood. But the concept ran away from the science, and the science never caught up. Screeners for the show came with a request that reviewers do not give away any plot details, but I think it’s safe to say that Holmes – who was found guilty of fraud and deceiving investors just weeks ago – found notoriety, if not the sort she was searching for.
The Dropout begins with the Holmes who will be familiar to fans of the podcast on which this series is based – deep-voiced and carefully answering questions during a taped legal deposition. Aside from a quick flashback to a running race in 1995, in which Holmes is so slow her teacher tells her to give up – it would be a heavy-handed metaphor, were it not true – Seyfried takes Holmes from her last days at school, through what was a revealingly traumatic time at university, to her years in San Francisco, raising billions of dollars of investment for a tech product that did not work.
Her metamorphosis from ambitious wannabe to Steve Jobs tribute act is played for tragedy and/or laughs, though not by Seyfried – who keeps it doggedly straight throughout – but in the circus that swirls around her. Brief forays into the outrageous world of obscene tech wealth hint at a Wolf of Wall Street energy that never materialises. Holmes’s mother Noel (Elizabeth Marvel) and the family’s wealthy, dastardly capitalist neighbour Richard (William H Macy) are ripped from a Christopher Guest movie, while Holmes’s boyfriend and business partner Sunny Balwani (Lost’s Naveen Andrews) is all bluster and menace. Holmes sits wide-eyed and wild-eyed, surprisingly passive, unconvincingly in the middle.
One of the show’s many issues is that it can’t decide whether it thinks Holmes’s predicament is trivial or not. In a way, this is understandable. The real Holmes is intriguing because, even now, it seems impossible to know what was going on in her mind. For the first two episodes, it grasps at elements of her personality and attempts to build a portrait out of them, but it can’t settle on what it wants her to be. Is she a klutz who can’t keep her bra strap up? Is she socially inept, unable to make friends, and so blunt with her own mother that she coolly informs her she is considering becoming sexually active for the first time? Is she a victim of bro-culture sexism? Or is she a visionary who wanted to do good in the world, whose precociousness catapulted her into a cutthroat business environment that required her to eat or be eaten? The story’s appeal, of course, is that she may have been all of these things, or some, or none. There is an opportunity to cleverly balance the possibilities, but instead it swings for the easiest of balls: a mother who can’t say “I love you”, a moment spelling out that Mark Zuckerberg is allowed to dress scruffily when Holmes is not, because he’s a man.
Much like Pam & Tommy, another rollercoaster re-enactment of a true story that is stuffed with stars but lacking in sense, this suffers from tonal insecurity. I suspect this comes from being based on true events, with a framework largely pre-written. It threatens to be camp, then backs away as if ashamed. It threatens to be thrilling, but never dares to go far enough. By episode three, at long last, it finds some consistency, as the screws tighten on the business Holmes has carefully constructed. It is far more comfortable as a nailbiter than it is as a farce. As soon as that thick eyeliner has been applied, the voice has deepened and the polo neck is on, there are hints that The Dropout may yet prove to be worth it.
