Last night I caught the first five episodes of Elizabeth Meriwether‘s The Dropout, and I have to say that I found Amanda Seyfried‘s performance as the discredited tech fraudster Elizabeth Holmes a tough pill to swallow. Not because it’s a “bad” performance, but because it’s so damn weird.
That’s because Seyfried/Holmes is too much of a freak — one of the strangest looking and sounding people I’ve ever encountered in fiction or real life. Seyfried’s imitation of Holmes’ facial expressions and manner of speaking is fairly exacting, but it’s still unsatisfying to watch this bizarre robot woman interact with all those Silicon Valley heavy-hitters.
I kept asking myself “who would be stupid enough to go into business with this creepy character…a woman who, had she been born in the 1940s, could have played an alien on The Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man”? Or Ray Walston‘s alien girlfriend in My Favorite Martian?”
Meriwether’s dialogue is reasonably pro-level for the most part, but I can only reiterate that I couldn’t believe in the story I was seeing because I found it impossible to believe in Seyfried’s Holmes. She’s just too looney-tunes, too “off the planet.”
Rotten Tomatoes Average Joe whom I mostly agree with: “There must be something wrong with me because I truly don’t understand how there are so many 4 and 5 stars. I literally cringed while watching this. Someone commented that ‘the dialogue is utter garbage’ and ‘there are so many things that have nothing to do with the story.’ I absolutely agree. Nothing is believable. The acting is absurd. It almost seems like a Three Stooges-type comedy. There’s no possible way someone with such silly, childish behavior would be accepted in the business world. I can go on and on about the silly scenes.
“What I do know is [that] Holmes duped many very smart people. What I can’t believe is that it went down anything close to the way it’s been portrayed, or perhaps it’s just so exaggerated to the point of ridicule. What am I missing?”
Tatiana makes an appearance in episode #5:
