All the Beauty and the Bloodshed review — unmissable film on Nan Goldin vs the Sacklers

Don’t make an enemy of an artist — they bring down empires. Such is the lesson of All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, the unmissable new documentary from director Laura Poitras. At its simplest, it is a record of the spectacular 2018-19 protests against the members of the Sackler family whose company Purdue Pharma produced the addictive opioid OxyContin, staged in museums whose galleries bore their name as donors. Those protests were led by photographer Nan Goldin, her work often featured in those same museums’ permanent collections. She was not alone; the film acknowledges her fellow activists. But Goldin is the force of nature, the catalyst.

Media attention has already fallen on the news story recounted here. So you may already know what is about to go down in the timecoded footage from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, circa 2018, activists preparing to launch their first protest in a torrent of pill bottles. But no one on camera does. Even Goldin is clearly unsure as to what exactly will happen next. A good documentarian — which Poitras is — could mine fine reportage simply from the “die-ins” that soon roll through various great museums.

But what elevates the film still higher is the longer story told of the world that made Goldin — and the one she made in turn. We learn of a childhood in the US suburbs where the stigma attached to mental illness delivers raw tragedy. Where do you run after that but the city? For Goldin, it was 1970s downtown Boston, then the Bowery of New York, a tribe found among the countercultural, androgynous and marginal, who became stars of her radiantly frank photography. But devastation looms again: Aids cutting down her friends. Again, this alone is the stuff of a whole film. The wonder is how the different aspects of the project — biography, elegy, contemporary journalism — dovetail so seamlessly.

The narrative finally turns back to OxyContin, as it must. Poitras measures her attack flawlessly. Yes, the Sacklers and Goldins are briefly paralleled as American families, the way a dramatist would. More importantly, though, a different model of being is kept in sight too. The Sacklers of Purdue are easy to loathe. The triumph of the film is in making a case for our fury and, in Nan Goldin, something better and braver too.

★★★★★

In UK cinemas from January 27