All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022)

Not rated, but it is pretty sexual, especially when looking at Nan's early career. The film is fundamentally anti-drug, especially when it comes to Big Pharma.  I suppose that the movie is supporting safe drug administration and is probably pro-recreational use of non-pharmaceutical medication.  There's language and domestic violence as well.  Still, not rated.

DIRECTOR:  Laura Poitras

Well, now that the Oscars are over, I have to still write about this?  I have such little motivation when it comes to this movie.  I don't want to write and I am going to use this time whining about my amazing life.  It is amazing.  My unborn child is healthy, according to the OB appointment.  I'm not addicted to Oxy, which is what this movie is all about.  I have a few minutes to write about a movie that I did not enjoy.  How blessed is that life?  It doesn't mean anything.  Realize that every single word written about All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is a moment of willpower over what I want to do versus what I am doing.

There's a story here.  I know that there's a story here because people have been preaching Dopesick to me for a while.  (I haven't gotten around to it because I'm busy watching other shows that I don't want to watch.  Again, very very blessed.)  Ever since Martin Shkreli, the Pharma Bro, became a household name, I've been at least invested in how Big Pharma works.  I'm going to use my blessings to contextualize what I feel about the whole thing.  I have an incredibly addictive personality over stupid things.  I intentionally don't drink and I don't use drugs because I see how incredibly addicted my body gets to processed sugar or fried foods or anything I do to replace those addictions.  God, I can't even imagine how I would be if I was addicted to pain medication.  The thing about pain medication is that it is something justifiable.  It's not done out of a sense of irresponsibility.  It's something to make life functional.  Because I'm an old man (kind of), I have back issues.  My back issues tend to be worse than most because of really bad scoliosis exasterbated by a surgery at a young age.  My back got wrecked a few years ago and I was in such pain that my personality changed.  While I didn't take intense meds because of the pain, had I been slightly less-critical of my tendencies towards addiction, I might be a fundamentally different person.

I don't want to downplay the addiction and abuse elements of this movie. These are real things.  The need for talks about addiction in this country need to happen on a scale that bring about real change.  Trust me, I do not care for what drug companies are doing to this country, coupled with the stigma of the addicts in the world.  But the way that this film is organized does a disservice to the message that the film wants to communicate. A personality gets in the way of a message and that's kind of the worst.  Now, to play Devil's Advocate (because, as you clearly see, I don't like this movie), I get where the movie was trying to go with the whole thing.  There's this whole other level with the notion of stigma and the artist that the movie really trying to sell as a concept. But the movie is split into two parts: the protests that are happening, bringing change to the art world in context to the Sackler Foundation, and the need to tell the story of Nan Goldin.  Now, part of the problem is me.  For as artistic as I am, when I'm done, I'm genuinely done.  I go really nerdy into the arts, but I also have a hard time empathizing for the artist.

The Nan Goldin portion of the movie might be one of the worst character references for the need to protest.  I've said this about other things, but if I start out on your team and by the end, I've backslid, something went really wrong.  Nan Goldin, as a survivor of Oxy dependency, is a person that I'm behind.  I want to see these elaborate protests put on by an artist who has an eye for disruption.  I'm all about that.  But most of the movie is about Nan Goldin, the photographer.  Nan Goldin, the photographer, (who has an amazing eye for art and that's not the problem), is a dramatic mess.  This is going to sound closed-minded (because it is), but imagine the stereotype of the artist living in New York.  You nailed it in one. Nan Goldin hits every beat of the eccentric artist, drugs, alcohol, abuse, prostitution, and all.  At a different time in my life, I would have idolized Nan Goldin.  She has all of the elements of Charles Bukowski without a need for Barfly to make it sexy for me.  But the two elements of the film don't work well together.

The sympathetic part of the whole arguement over Oxy is that it gets its grip into anybody.  Nan Goldin is the wrong face for this movie.  Oxy is so dangerous that you don't have to have an addictive personality to die from a need for Oxy.  The story is about how the Sacklers, for all of their artistic altruism, is wholeheartedly aware that their number one product kills so many people per day and absolutely don't care.  The most important scene in the movie is when the Sacklers have to do a Zoom call and listen to the tragic tales of how this medication caused so much pain and that they just sat there.  The story shouldn't be about Nan Goldin.  The story is right there.  Yes, Nan Goldin needs to be a part of All the Beauty and the Bloodshed because the immediate goal of the movie is the removal of the Sackler name from any of the wings of the multitude of museums that carry their name.  That's great and Nan Goldin needs to be a part of that.  But that seems like such a small part of what is a far more tragic story.  I want to contextualize my frustration about this in a way that means a lot to me.  (It's the me that matters, apparently.) 

During the BLM movement, one of the many facets of that protest was the removal of statues that were in commemoration of monsters.  Trust me, I'm all about that and, if we meet, I have lots to say about how all racist statues should be removed, your perverted version of history be damned.  But, if the movement was just about one person removing statues and how we ignored all of the systematic racism that BLM was fighting for, we'd feel like it would cheapen the overall message.  All the Beauty and the Bloodshed isn't so much a movie about arresting the Sacklers.  There's the cathartic moment of seeing them be miserable on a Zoom call and I guess that's nice.  But the story is really about museums giving up massive donations on the part of the Sacklers.  The Sackler Foundation was really about the progenitor of the Sackler family.  That guy is long dead.  He was the art nerd in the family and he's the reason that all of these wings carry the Sackler name.  I'm sure the extended family probably love the good press that these museums afford the Sackler family.  But it kind of feels like it's no skin off their backs.  They're already the villains of the story and they've embraced that villainy.  Removing the names off of the Sackler wings is less about the Sacklers getting their comeuppance as much as it is having Nan Goldin make a splash sticking it to the man.

I do sympathize with Nan Goldin's journey with Oxy.  It is a terrible thing to go through and she seems genuine in her need to stick it to the Sacklers. But the world of Nan Goldin and the Sacklers seems so myopic compared to what the story that is playing out in the background.  There are all these tales of how people were affected, but it kept going back to Nan Goldin and P.A.I.N. (don't get me started on forced acronyms).  The movie just feels like such a disservice to what could have been a powerhouse of a movie.  Instead, I was watching a lot of Nan Goldin's art as if I should have been applauding for her work.  I get it.  She's very talented.  Make a movie about Nan Goldin separate from the goal of taking down the Sacklers.  These movies don't go together.  They are weakening each other, leaving a movie that makes me feel more apathetic than activated.  I want to be activated about something like this, but I couldn't imagine having to get through this movie again.