The Dropout, review: enthralling tale of the Silicon Valley guru who duped Joe Biden
The Dropout (Disney+) does something that feels positively radical these days: it tells a story straightforwardly and in chronological order. No ricocheting between time periods, no introduction to characters or storylines whose presence will remain baffling until episode seven. As a viewer this feels very calming.
The series shares some common ground with the recent Netflix drama Inventing Anna, because both are the true stories of women who constructed fake personas to dupe investors. The subject here is Elizabeth Holmes, the Silicon Valley CEO hailed as the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, but whose tech company was based on tech that didn’t actually work. Joe Biden, Henry Kissinger and Bill Clinton were among the high-profile figures who supported Holmes's work.
If you have seen Inventing Anna, The Dropout initially seems flat by comparison; the Netflix offering is at times as giddily deranged as its protagonist, and the fun is in seeing the rich and stupid fall for her nonsense. But The Dropout slowly draws you in, because the stakes are so much higher and Holmes’s rise is enthralling.
In episode one, the drama seems to be on Holmes’s side. Played by Amanda Seyfried (of Mamma Mia! fame), we see her as a socially awkward but fiercely determined teen, focused on inventing a product that “mankind didn’t know it was possible to do”. Her desire to be rich is driven, in part, by witnessing her father’s devastation at losing his job with Enron. She later quits Stanford University - hence the show’s title - to set up Theranos, hoping to develop a revolutionary machine that could detect cancer, diabetes and a host of other conditions by testing one pinprick of blood.
According to the show, she set out with good intentions but began lying out of desperation when the technology failed. As the episodes go by, she becomes more ruthless and the lies stack up. Seyfried conveys the character’s saucer-eyed oddness. “I don’t feel things the way other people feel things,” she tells her boyfriend, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani (Naveen Andrews), although it’s unclear if the show is suggesting some sort of personality disorder.
It was the little details about Holmes that people found so fascinating: maintaining a fake voice an octave lower than her own; dressing all in black to ape her idol, Steve Jobs. We see Holmes practising both of these things, constructing a persona which she thinks will help her to be taken seriously. And, as history shows, it worked.
There is an excellent supporting cast here of Theranos employees, either deeply uneasy about the fakery or unaware of it: notable are James Hiroyuki Liao as engineer Edmond Ku and Stephen Fry as Ian Gibbons, a British scientist whose fundamental decency is at odds with Holmes’s methods.
