At first glance, Laura Poitras’ latest documentary appears to represent a stark change of pace. In a directorial career that dates back almost 20 years, she’d worked exclusively in the political arena, making docs about the U.S. occupation of Iraq (My Country, My Country), America’s abuses in pursuit of the “war on terror” (The Oath), and Julian Assange’s managing of WikiLeaks from London’s Ecuadorian embassy (Risk, made several years prior to his arrest and imprisonment). Most famously, Poitras is the director who was contacted by Edward Snowden immediately after he fled to (initially) Hong Kong, resulting in the remarkable, practically real-time account of that whistleblowing scandal, Citizenfour. Even her contribution to last year’s omnibus pandemic film The Year of the Everlasting Storm was an exposé about Israeli spyware, made in collaboration with human rights investigators.


Point is, she’s got a well-established shingle, and it doesn’t involve making biographical portraits of celebrated artists. Yet here we have All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, this year’s surprise Golden Lion winner at Venice (beating out such wildly acclaimed competition as TÁR and The Banshees of Inisherin), which chronicles the life and career of photographer Nan Goldin. That Goldin merits the attention is beyond doubt, and the visual nature of her work translates perfectly to cinema, but I was still perplexed. Why Poitras? There is a reason, as it turns out, and therein lies my frustration with the film: It’s really two distinct films—each of them absorbing on its own—that have been inelegantly stitched together. As far as I can tell, this troubles exactly nobody else on earth. You will search in vain for a review, other than the one you’re currently reading, that calls into question Beauty and Bloodshed’s (let’s call it for short) structural foundation. Still, I stubbornly maintain that it’s built upon a specious equivalence.


First, we’ve got the conventional, comprehensive Nan Goldin portrait that one might expect, were one familiar (as I was) only with the highlights of her résumé. One project towers above all others: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986), a collection of candid photographs—mostly of Goldin’s friends, along with numerous self-portraits—that was originally projected as a slideshow accompanied by music, then eventually published in book form. Notable for their striking intimacy, as well as for affirming the existence and importance of people who don’t conform to traditional gender roles (or to much of anything else, for that matter), the photos are accompanied here by Goldin’s recollection of that turbulent period in both her own life and the history of New York City, along with reminiscences about her friendships with fellow maverick artists like David Wojnarowicz and Cookie Mueller, both of whom died young of AIDS-related illnesses. None of this particularly distinguishes itself from the glut of similar biographical docs (including a recent one about Wojnarowicz himself), but it’s informative and compelling.


Then there’s the aspect that seems more up Poitras’ alley: Goldin’s recent political activism. After becoming addicted to OxyContin, originally prescribed to manage a wrist injury, she became instrumental in the campaign to hold the Sackler family accountable for America’s opioid crisis, forming an organization called P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) and orchestrating protests designed to remove the Sackler name from various museums. Much of the film was shot at these events over the past several years, with Poitras’ camera capturing, for example, Goldin and her P.A.I.N. cohorts dropping hundreds of fake OxyContin prescription slips from atop the Guggenheim’s famous atrium, so that they gently rain down upon bewildered patrons. Incredibly—given how much money the Sacklers had been spending to buy respectability—their efforts eventually paid off: Museums around the world returned donations and renamed Sackler wings. The film’s emotional climax (excepting an epilogue of sorts, which I’ll get to momentarily) observes a Zoom session in which family members, as part of a settlement agreement, have to sit and stonily listen to Goldin and other opioid victims describe the living hell that they experienced.


Not an uninteresting life, by any means. Poitras, however, has chosen to divide it into six chapters, with titles like “Merciless Logic,” “Against Our Vanishing” and “Escape Hatch.” And each of those chapters—excepting, again, the last one, “Sisters”—has been structured in exactly the same way: First Goldin’s personal history, then her current activism. A big chunk of old stuff followed by a big chunk of new stuff. In addition to becoming tediously metronomic, this back and forth makes a very appealing but, in my ornery opinion, fundamentally misguided argument: to wit, that Goldin didn’t recently become an activist, but has in fact always been an activist. That her photography, way back in the ’80s, was merely another variety of political action, by virtue of documenting sexuality and gender fluidity and (in one horrifically memorable photograph) the evidence of one partner’s physical abuse. That those things are valuable and possess an impact that transcends their surface content does not make them activism, and claiming otherwise devalues both the word and the impulse. It’s the warm and fuzzy flip side of assertions that, say, materialism is “really just another sort of religion.” No. It isn’t. Beauty and Bloodshed’s oscillating comparison of Goldin’s ultra-intimate, aesthetically bold photography with her righteously angry quest to stop destructive billionaires from ruining lives for profit simply doesn’t illuminate either. Mostly, it just keeps interrupting the film’s momentum on each of its parallel tracks.


“Sisters,” the aforementioned final chapter, is another structural fumble, albeit a powerful one. Goldin’s older sister, Barbara, spent time in and out of psychiatric care as a teenager, and eventually died by suicide at 18, when Nan was 11. This was a formative event for Goldin, as one might well imagine, and it’s heartbreaking to hear her recount the details as she remembers and understands them, assisted by clinical reports from Barbara’s institutional stays. (One such mimeographed document provides the film with its title—a revelation that’s all the more chilling for how little it’s emphasized, viewed briefly as part of a montage, just one barely contextualized phrase on one professionally uncomprehending page among many.) Only a sociopath would fail to respond to Goldin’s lingering anguish, all these decades later. But Poitras’ decision to withhold that material for the final minutes, rather than including it in the early section about Goldin’s childhood, makes it come across as an effort to “explain” her art and her activism, in the same way that Charles Foster Kane’s entire miserable life ostensibly gets reduced to his yearning for the sled he’d been playing with a boy when his life irrevocably changed. Orson Welles was wise enough to undermine this tidiness by having someone scoff at it, and Goldin’s first words to the camera here (though she’s only heard at that point, not seen) actually suggest a similar skepticism: “It’s easy to make your life into stories.” Ultimately, though, that’s what All the Beauty and the Bloodshed does with Nan Goldin’s life, and while reductive neatness is definitely preferable to utter shapelessness—the disease that afflicts most filmed biographies, whether documentary or drama—it’s still not the stuff of greatness.


One of the first notable online film critics, having launched his site The Man Who Viewed Too Much in 1995, Mike D’Angelo has also written professionally for Entertainment Weekly, Time Out New York, The Village Voice, Esquire, Las Vegas Weekly, and The A.V. Club, among other publications. He’s been a member of the New York Film Critics Circle and currently blathers opinions almost daily on Patreon.