The Dropout: Theranos, for the Grace of Jobs, Goes Amanda Seyfried in Elizabeth Holmes mini-series
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B
Billionaire worship is not new. The doings of the Rockefellers, Carnegies and Vanderbilts fascinated the masses in their day. But there’s a digitally amplified passion to the attention given to the Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Elon Musks of the world.
The ghost of Apple co-founder Jobs literally hangs over The Dropout, the eight-part Disney+ series starring Amanda Seyfried as Elizabeth Holmes, the real-life scammer (and short-term actual billionaire) whose blood-testing medical company Theranos went from a massively hyped boon to humanity to one of the century’s most notorious frauds.
In the opening three episodes – released on the streaming service this week, with weekly follow-ups to come – we see the teenage Holmes in her bedroom where a Jobs poster dominates the wall like a pop star. She’s singing along to a favourite tune that’s pounding her eardrums via the buds on her iPod. She even favours wearing a black turtleneck, Jobs’ signature style.
And when asked by her parents and visiting friends what she wants to do with her life, her candid answer is, “become a billionaire.”
It’s not like a yacht or a private jet is uppermost in her mind. The words coming out of her mouth, at least, pay lip service to doing good. Though the real Elizabeth Holmes is awaiting sentencing for up to 20 years for defrauding investors, The Dropout is not a portrait of a criminal in training. Nor is it an apologia.
Interspersed with short scenes from her criminal trial, the person we meet so far is marching towards her goal in her own strange way.
Though a “big picture” person, she has trouble relating to people, and practices in the mirror making clever conversation in a baritone voice. She has bored sex with a boyfriend, seemingly because it’s what normal people do.
She studies computer programming, she studies Mandarin and goes to Beijing to fine-tune her proficiency under a Stanford program. She works at a genome lab in Singapore, files a patent for drug-delivery patch and quits school to start a healthcare technology firm with other people’s money.
There’s a “there” there, a trajectory that could have made her a bona fide captain of the healthcare industry, but for her inability to accept setbacks and her decision to lie her way through them.
Seyfried is the best thing about The Dropout, in that she’s not playing a “type” with her quirks and strange behaviour. If the point of dramatizing the life of a real person is to explain them, then this is not that. She is a mess of quirks and contradictions, ruthless one moment, unsure the next, sincere and yet duplicitous. She is desperate or the help of her older backer, eventual co-conspirator and sometime lover Sunny Balwani (Naveen Andrews), and dismissive of him at other times.
That free-wheeling characterization, and a solid supporting cast (including Sam Waterston as early investor George Shultz and Laurie Metcalf as Stanford medical professor Phyllis Gardner, who would blow the whistle on Holmes), are the main reasons to invest your time on The Dropout.
The Dropout. Executive produced and directed by Michael Showalter. Starring Amanda Seyfried, Naveen Andrews and Sam Waterston. First three episodes available on Disney+ with the final five subsequent episodes being released weekly.