All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

There's a family who had legalised addiction, who pushed their products to administer more affliction, once you're trapped it's hard to leave, there's a good chance that you'll grieve, if you know someone, they'll need more than benediction.

A wonderful piece of factual storytelling focused around Nan Goldin's pursuit of justice and recompense for those helplessly hooked on Oxycontin, a drug that was peddled without remorse by people who thought they were above the law. The film also explores in some detail the life of Nan, her career as an artist, the wild and colourful characters she got to know in NYC, and the often crazy things she found herself doing, as well as her life as a child and the sister she lost.

As "All the Beauty and the Bloodshed" (2022 release; 118 min.) opens, it is "March 10, 2018", and a group of activists is staging a protest at the Met, more particularly the Sackler Wing. We then go to "1. Merciless Logic" as Nan Goldin starts talking about her early youth, and how her sister Barbara commits suicide when Nan was only 7. At this point we are less than 10 minutes into the film.

Couple of comments: this is the latest from well respected documentarian Laura Poitras ("Citizenfour"). Here she brings us a nuanced portrait and assessment of photographer Nan Goldin, best known for documenting the NY underground scene in the 70s and 80s. At the same time Poitras looks back at the mysterious suicide of Nan's sister Barbara in 1965. And last but not least, Poitras follows Goldin and other members of the activist group P. A. I. N. in their attempts to hold the Sackler family which owns Purdue Company, manufacturer of Valium and Oxycontin, responsible for the opioid crisis in this country (Goldin herself is a survivor of Oxycontin addiction). The beauty of this documentary consisting of 7 chapters is how these three subjects are woven together, with Goldin herself narrating much of it. I was absolutely fascinated by it all, and I am already going on record that this documentary is a shoo-in to get a Best Documentary Oscar nomination.

"All the Beauty and the Bloodshed" premiered at last Fall's Venice Film Festival to immediate critical acclaim, winning the festival's top prize along the way. It is currently rated 93% Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, and for very good reasons. I see a LOT of documentaries, and surely this is one of the very best, if not THE best, documentaries of 2022, and also one of the very best movies of 2002, period. The documentary opened this weekend at my local arthouse theater here in Cincinnati. The Tuesday evening screening where I saw this at was attended very nicely (I counted about 25-30 people). If you like a top-notch documentary, I'd readily suggest you check this out, and draw your own conclusion.

This documentary about Nan Goldin and her battles throughout her life--personally and professionally--is many pronged with New York as the background. She was part of the art movement in the 1980's when AIDS started to invade that scene unabated since the administration of the time felt it was only a gay disease and would not be addressed. Her anger could have been surmised as the beginning there, but then we got a glimpse of her life growing up with the poor treatment her sister got by her parents. Things progressed from there. Her activism developed in the 1980's and continued into the age of Purdue Pharmacy's creation and rampant spread of oxycodone. The documentary may seem to be a bit of a hodgepodge of memories, but when you understand that her anger was developing almost from the moment she was born, you can understand how heartfelt her concern was for those who died around her. This was nominated as Best Feature Documentary for the Oscars It is an uncomfortable yet quite informative watch.

You would think, as an enterpreneur who had created/developed this product, as you saw that it was contributing to 100s of thousands of deaths throughout the world, you would attempt to do something, anything, to reign in the misuse and misapplication of the product. Maybe you would put some money into combatting the misuse and consequences of misuse, of your product. But no, the family put money, lots of it, into entertainment for the wealthy, the educated, the priviliged few who attend the Louvre, the Met, the Guggenheim, etc. After all, they believed "no one is forcing them to misuse our product". The film is powerful. It shows the power of people who come together to fight evil and apathy, in spite of themselves. I enjoyed the film and I would have joined them on their march for justice.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed can join Fire of Love in the club of Oscar-nominated documentaries from 2022 that would have been more worthy winners than Navalny. It's admittedly a small club, but I feel like both of those movies have moments that demonstrate documentary filmmaking at its best.

In the case of All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, it's probably the final 15-20 minutes that shines the brightest. It can be a slow and somewhat uneven feeling documentary at some points, but it builds to some phenomenal and emotionally hard hitting final scenes. The rest of the documentary still tends to hit far more often than it misses, but I did get the sense it may have been a tiny bit too long, and while I respect the choice not to tie together its two primary narratives more explicitly, part of me was waiting for them to collide more directly at a point. Still, leaving some of that up to the viewer felt like a deliberate choice, and I can respect that.

It follows Nan Goldin, with the film both recounting her life story from the 1950s to the 1990s and detailing her activism against the Sackler family and their role in the opioid epidemic in the 2010s. The latter might be more interesting narratively, but the former has the more interesting presentation, seeing as Goldin's an accomplished artist/photographer, and the documentary frequently relies on her work to serve as visuals.

It's a heavy and often sad documentary, dealing with mental illness, addiction, corruption, censorship, the AIDS crisis, discrimination, and domestic violence. It might be upsetting to some viewers as a result, but I think it was best not to pull punches (so long as people know what they're in for before deciding to watch it). It's a largely powerful documentary that I think will stick with me. Not perfect, but it has some amazing sequences that were very striking and moving.