All The Beauty and the Bloodshed – Heavy For Better or Worse

The best documentaries either inform or shine a light on important issues relevant to the time they are made. That being said, they aren’t always necessarily the easiest to watch. Despite this, it does not make them any less important. The opioid epidemic has been an issue plaguing much of the world for a long time, leading to hundreds of thousands of overdose deaths annually, but has only recently gotten attention on a wide scale. The biggest culprit has been Oxycontin, an opioid that could be traced to the controversial Sackler family through their pharmaceutical company Perdue Pharma. All The Beauty and the Bloodshed is a documentary that tackles the impact of the opioid epidemic and the fight against the Sackler family and their influence through the eyes of famed photographer Nan Goldin who has a tragic story of her own involving addiction and loss. Running at just under 2 hours, the film attempts to pack a lot of content in there, jumping between the past and the present. Two stories worthy of their own films, this film feels a little bloated and suffers from that bloat. Jumping back and forth, there is little to no flow as its momentum is often stalled. In the end, its parts just outweigh their sum. Though it is still a tough watch, it is also still an important one.

All The Beauty and the Bloodshed, as mentioned, is a documentary that follows Nan Goldin and the efforts of P.A.I.N., the advocacy organization she founded to respond to the opioid crisis and hold the Sackler family accountable for their complicity in creating and profiting from the crisis primarily by attacking their reputation in the art world. Meanwhile, the film dove into Goldin’s tragic backstory including her own struggles with opioid addiction and how it led to her photography career and her battle today. A roller coaster story, it had plenty of ups and downs and emotion as she found herself and her purpose in life, finding photography as a means to understand the world and cope with her tragic backstory, all while also serving as an interesting time capsule highlighting her activism and her lack of fear of controversy over several decades. Living a life of excess and drugs, an oxycontin prescription following an operation in 2014 led to an addiction which took over her life for three years.

Barely recovering from that addiction, she made the connection between the opioid epidemic and the Sackler family for whom Goldin was familiar with, operating in the same circles as the family who donated heavily to countless museums and galleries worldwide. From there, P.A.I.N. and her new life mission began. Helping and advocating for all those affected by the opioid crisis, nothing was really going to happen until the Sackler family was held accountable. Doing so through a court of law was going to be an uphill battle therefore the court of public opinion was a more feasible goal. To do so, the various museums and galleries complicit in advancing their reputation and funneling their blood money. Performing demonstrations or participating in protests, they put the pressure on them to stop taking Sackler money and to remove their name off of the installations set up as a result of their donations. Those displays were definitely sobering to watch as they made sure anyone in their vicinity knew what they did and are still doing. While the fight was inspiring to watch, at the end of the day, there was only so much they could do here as that fight is far from over.

Using a series if slideshows of Goldin’s work curated by Goldin herself as well as the usual documentary tropes of archival footage, interviews with Goldin and other prominent figures in the story, and intimate present-day footage, All The Beauty and the Bloodshed weaves a somewhat compelling narrative that doesn’t quite work as a whole. Nevertheless, Goldin is a character for sure which alone provided some entertainment.

At the end of the day, All The Beauty and the Bloodshed is an unfortunately topical watch that will be hard to watch but is nonetheless an important one that will have audiences feeling things while also making them think.

still courtesy of Elevation Pictures

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Keith Noakes

The EIC of the coincidentally-named keithlovesmovies.com. A Canadian who prefers to get out of the cold and into the warmth of a movie theatre.