122 min | NR | November 23, 2022 | Neon
Photographer Nan Goldin builds her life into a slideshow, then aims her organizing muscle at the Sackler family whose painkillers killed her and a generation. Laura Poitras splits the screen between the art and the war. Both halves are about the same thing: who gets to look away.
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed runs on two tracks at once. One is Nan Goldin narrating her own life through the photographs she has been taking since the 1970s. The other is Goldin’s group P.A.I.N. staging die-ins inside museums to force those institutions to drop the Sackler name. The film is not a biography and it is not an issue documentary. It is an argument that the personal and the political are the same machine, and that the people who profit from addiction depend on a culture trained to keep its pain private.
Nan Goldin appears as herself and gives the film its spine. She narrates her sister’s institutionalization, her years in the East Village, and the friends she lost to AIDS with a flat, unsparing voice that refuses to soften the material. Megan Kapler and Harry Cullen appear as fellow organizers, and the film shows them planning actions in cramped apartments with the dread of people who know the targets have lawyers. Patrick Radden Keefe appears as himself to lay out the Sackler money trail. The activists are not heroic figures in the footage. They are tired people doing unglamorous logistical work.
Laura Poitras directs with the same surveillance-aware instincts she brought to her earlier work on Edward Snowden. She structures the film in seven chapters that braid the slideshow past with the courtroom present, so that Goldin’s old photographs keep detonating inside the new fight. The most precise choice is the use of Goldin’s actual slideshow format, complete with her recorded narration and the projector rhythm, as a formal engine rather than a nostalgic insert. Poitras lets a Sackler deposition play over Zoom audio while families of the dead read victim statements into the same call. The editing makes the corporate distance audible.
The film holds because it never lets the museum protests stand in for catharsis. The Sacklers do not face the punishment the film knows they deserve, and Poitras stays with that failure instead of manufacturing a win. Goldin’s life and her campaign rhyme without the film flattening either into a lesson. It treats art as evidence and grief as a form of intelligence-gathering. By the end the title stops being a phrase and becomes the method.