Amanda Seyfried follows up her Oscar-nominated portrayal of silver screen legend by taking on the role of a Silicon Valley fraudster in “The Dropout.” The “Mank” actress heads Hulu’s limited series about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, a Stanford dropout who made history as the youngest self-made female billionaire.
“The world works in certain ways until a new great idea comes along and changes everything,” Elizabeth announces early on in the series. Her great idea is to make it possible for folks to test their blood at home, and not with a vial of blood, but just a drop. Convinced that her machine will “change the world” and make healthcare “accessible to everyone in this country,” she refuses to heed warnings that technology simply hasn’t advanced enough to make her ideas a reality. She finds support, funding, and legitimacy from rich and powerful backers, while refusing to address the mounting concerns of her team.
It’s painful to watch as Elizabeth focuses on everything except the escalating crisis surrounding the practicalities of her billion dollar-plus idea. It becomes more and more clear that the idea simply can’t be executed. It was a great idea, but won’t be made a reality anytime soon. Elizabeth doesn’t just refuse to see the writing on the wall. She’s determined to paint over it, concealing the truth from her employees and investors.
Desperation and unchecked ambition transform the idealistic overachiever into an increasingly unethical grifter, an arc that Seyfried depicts with impressive aplomb. The “Mamma Mia!” star perfectly captures Elizabeth’s youthful naivety as an undergrad and her physical and spiritual metamorphosis as she and Theranos gain power and influence, adopting a deeper voice and a more refined aesthetic, complete with a Steve Jobs-esque black turtleneck. But there’s always something that’s not quite right about Elizabeth. She’s self-consciously performing a certain brand of femininity, and it’s never seamless — her lipstick is inexpertly applied, her stray hairs refuse to be tamed. It’s always clear that she’s trying, trying hard, and her efforts to fit in, to stand out, to be one of the girls, to be one of the guys, to relate to someone else, to assert dominance over them, almost always fall short.
“The Dropout” hails from Liz Meriwether, best known for creating “New Girl,” a Fox sitcom about a famously adorkable teacher played by Zooey Deschanel. Whereas Deschanel’s character’s quirks charm, Seyfried’s repel. Elizabeth’s awkwardness isn’t perceived as endearing — it’s unsettling. Of course, Elizabeth needn’t have worried so much about likability as a man. But as a young woman, she’s constantly forced to prove that she’s capable of leading a company and worthy of respect.
One of the real tragedies of “The Dropout” and the story that inspired it is that Elizabeth’s catastrophic business and ethical failure made it even harder for women in tech, a field that was already famously inhospitable to them. In the series, we see a number of women telling Elizabeth how happy they are to be working for a woman, a rare opportunity that they feel grateful for. It’s painful to witness these moments knowing what’s to come — and how her legacy may impact future female visionaries in Silicon Valley. It’s grossly unfair that one individual’s downfall could impact generations of women, but when there are so few women at the top, each failure is weighed on an entirely different scale than their male counterparts’. Whether or not her name is invoked, Elizabeth Holmes will be used to justify distrust in young women’s ability to lead. Her many (male) enablers and the flawed systems that allowed her to get away with such flagrant lies will be forgiven and forgotten long before she is.
The first three episodes of “The Dropout” are now streaming on Hulu. New episodes drop Thursdays.
