All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

The documentary is the great American story of the outsiders coming in and rising up. You need to see it.

If you’ve ever doubted how art, rage or action can make meaningful change, Goldin’s combination of all three fighting an opioid crisis that nearly killed her is exhilarating proof of the power of “screaming in the streets,” to borrow what the queer artist David Wojnarowicz — one of many close friends of Goldin’s whom the AIDS epidemic took — wryly described as a necessary ritual of the living in a time of too much death.

Already a robust director, Laura Poitras has leveled up with a towering and devastating work of shocking intelligence and still greater emotional power... This is an overwhelming film.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed remains, at heart, a simple and intimate profile of a woman who sees art and activism as one and the same.

Goldin might not have known it when she started photographing her LGBTQ friends, but her work has always been about looking at the so-called fringe cultures in society, about showing the problems that the masses would rather just ignore and making them so urgent that you can’t look away anymore.

If you’re looking for a more granular account of the Oxy epidemic and its perpetrators, Emmy-nominated miniseries Dopesick and investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe’s bestseller ‘Empire of Pain’ both have your back. But All the Beauty and the Bloodshed plots a slightly different kind of narrative: one that’s full of defiance and emotion.

As a character portrait, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is absorbing, but as an argument it fails.

What’s profound, and incendiary, about “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” is the way that Laura Poitras excavates the story of how deeply Nan Goldin’s photographs are rooted in trauma. There was always a life force to the photos; she started taking them in Boston in 1973, where she first bonded with what was then thought of as the gay subculture, along with the demimonde of drag queens (who could be arrested just for walking down the street), and her bone-deep recognition of the humanity of the friends she photographed was a tonic. But the movie goes back to tell the story of Goldin’s clueless, domineering, and repressive parents, and of her older sister, Barbara — a free spirit who came along in suburbia too early for the ’60s, and was institutionalized for having “impulses” we would now view as healthy. She committed suicide at the age of 18, in 1964 (when Nan was 11), by laying down on train tracks. Goldin viewed her sister’s death as, in effect, a murder. And what she was drawn to, first in Boston and then, in New York, amid the grungy world of the Bowery, were people who wore their violence and damage on the outside: in their clothing, their drug use and exhibitionistic abandon, the look in their eye of godless and maybe glamorous hunger. Lurking behind Goldin’s work is the sense of life itself as predatory.

Have you ever watched a movie that feels like it could readily be split into two separate pictures? Such is the case – and the problem – with this latest offering from documentarian Laura Poitras. The film’s dual tracks showcase (1) the campaigns of the activist group P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) formed by artist/photographer Nan Goldin to expose the greed-mongering atrocities of Purdue Pharma, manufacturer of the highly addictive opioid painkiller OxyContin, and the Sackler family, the principals behind this organization, and (2) the life, career and addiction struggle of the artist herself. In particular, the film follows P.A.I.N.’s activities to protest the Sacklers’ efforts to deflect attention away from their nefarious behavior by making huge donations to the arts community (including many notable museums) by staging highly vocal, highly visible demonstrations at those facilities to draw attention to this issue, particularly the mounting number of deaths that have resulted from addiction to this prescription drug. Simultaneously, the documentary charts Goldin’s journey through her colorful, prolific and high-profile career, which eventually led to a period of addiction (whose origins are never really made clear) that nearly killed her. While each of these narrative tracks is explored capably in themselves, they never quite mesh into a complete, coherent whole. Goldin’s struggle with the opioid serves as an anemic lynchpin that attempts to connect these two story threads. But the central nexus isn’t strong enough to link them effectively, each of which individually could have served as the bases for films all unto themselves – and that ultimately would have each been more engaging and compelling than this underdeveloped hybrid product, which often feels like it’s stretching to find its true footing. The work of P.A.I.N. is arguably the stronger of the two stories, and focusing on that aspect of the story by itself would have made for a better and much more impactful picture. Unfortunately, that’s not how matters play out, a disappointment given that it deals with such an important subject. Providing the proper focus for her projects seems to be an ongoing issue for the filmmaker, one that previously became apparent in her award-winning but underwhelming real-time documentary “Citizenfour” (2014) about the revelations of Edward Snowden, a shortcoming that, regrettably, has been repeated here. I find that frustrating, especially since this meandering offering, like its predecessor, has been showered with considerable undeserved praise, including an Oscar nomination for best documentary feature. Poitras clearly has a lot to say, but it’s unfortunate that she has still yet to figure out how to say it more effectively than she does.