The Sackler family’s criminal responsibility for the opioid crisis is well-known, but less familiar is artist Nan Goldin’s involvement in holding them accountable. Laura Poitras (CitizenFour) weaves that story in an intimate collaboration with Goldin, who in typical Goldin fashion forthrightly lays out the ups and downs of a life we thought was well-documented, until now. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is a documentary one expects will check all the usual boxes: a David and Goliath story ending with the kind of satisfied exhilaration that comes from seeing a worthy cause triumph. While there is that element, Poitras’ aims are more penetrating, using the Sackler crusade as a way of delving into Goldin’s life and teasing out the sources of her commitment to living openly, proudly, and with no excuses. Festivals have already nabbed the title, which will certainly find a welcoming home in rep houses and streaming.
Following a prologue showing Goldin and fellow activists staging a die-in at the Temple of Dendur pavilion (then known as the Sackler Wing) of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Poitras divides the documentary into six sections, each starting with a chapter from Goldin’s life and ending with her involvement with P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), a group dedicated to discrediting the Sacklers, owners of Purdue Pharma. At first the structure seems like it won’t work, as if adding the fight against big pharmaceuticals at the end of each section makes this element feel tacked on, but as the film develops, the effectiveness of the form comes through, emphasizing the organic path that led one of America’s most celebrated photographer-artists to this particular stage in her life.
The film begins and closes with Goldin’s sister Barbara, a rebellious teenager whose hunger to explore life and escape the claustrophobic confines of a Boston suburb led to her senseless institutionalization and subsequent suicide. She is the film’s phantom presence – the title comes from a psychiatric evaluation reporting on Barbara’s response to a Rorschach test – the “that could have been me” catalyst who haunts her sister Nan’s subconscious. Goldin escaped the trap of her emotionally ill-equipped parents when she was put into foster care at 14, but that wasn’t much of an improvement until she was placed in a progressive school that encouraged self-expression. There with the help of more open friends she began to find her way as both a person and an artist. Already part of the queer scene in Provincetown, she moved to New York in 1978 and joined a circle of like-minded creative spirits she began photographing, documenting the downtown scene in a way that was intimate and penetrating, part celebration, part collaboration: as Darryl Pinckney says, “she photographs from our side.”
Goldin speaks openly about those days, when she worked as a stripper in New Jersey and later in a cheap brothel, discovering her political empowerment while tending bar at Maggie Smith’s Tin Pan Alley. Her revolutionary series “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” issued in 1985, explored the frequently toxic nature of binary gender roles, while her curatorship of the AIDS-related exhibition “Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing” in 1989 was an enraged, galvanizing scream against the stigmatization of people suffering the effects of HIV illnesses. Goldin’s career has always been marked by a fearlessness, well-captured by Poitras, which makes her initial anxiety in challenging the power of the Sacklers rather peculiar. No name in the contemporary art world carries greater weight, and while there is of course a difference in the power of an artist and that of a mega-rich family, it comes as a surprise to hear her and other P.A.I.N. members express concern for their safety on taking on such a giant.
Purdue Pharma is the company that brought us valium and then oxycontin, a fiendishly addictive opioid whose deadly traits were well-known to the Sackler family, and yet they pushed a marketing campaign denying any such effects, encouraging doctors to prescribe ever-larger doses to people suffering from a variety of pain disorders. The Sacklers’ active role in flooding the market with the drug and suppressing negative reports earned them billions of dollars, some of which they donated to cultural institutions worldwide – few major museums didn’t have a Sackler gallery or some major gift to grace their buildings and collections. Goldin and P.A.I.N. recognized this as an attempt to whitewash their culpability and set out not only to hold them accountable, but to have their names erased from museum walls.
Poitras’ one misstep lies in not explaining why museums were so resistant to pushing the Sacklers away: after all, were it just about that one family, institutions like the Met Museum and the Louvre could easily have spun their disassociation in a way that would burnish their own image. The problem is that countless other donors look at how a mega-patron has been humiliated, and they turn resistant to giving any work of art or financial donation. That’s a nightmare scenario for every museum board, and that’s why everyone resisted for so long until the optics, thanks to the persistent actions of P.A.I.N. and investigative articles like the one Patrick Radden Keefe published in The New Yorker, became so toxic they finally had to erase a name now synonymous with callous greed.
Goldin herself became addicted, and she nearly died of an overdose. Her drive to brand the Sacklers as evil was kick-started by that crisis, but as All the Beauty shows, the roots of her activism started much earlier, when she saw gay loved ones treated as garbage and drug-addicted friends judged and dismissed. The Sacklers names have been removed, after a long battle, but of course capitalism doesn’t ever truly punish the fat cats, and while they may have experienced an iota of discomfort when forced to watch people tell their agonizing stories of pain and loss, they’re still sitting pretty and protected. That doesn’t mean the actions of Goldin and her colleagues haven’t made a change: on the contrary, cultural bodies now think twice about the source of their gifts. Through Poitras, Goldin traces all that back to her sister Barbara, the inspiration for her rebellious, freely lived and proudly messy life.
Director: Laura Poitras
With: Nan Goldin, David Velasco, Megan Kapler, Noemi Bonazzi, Patrick Radden Keefe, Harry Cullen, Marina Berio, Darryl Pinckney, Annatina Miescher, Mike Quinn
Producers: Howard Gertler, John Lyons, Nan Goldin, Yoni Golijov, Laura Poitras
Co-producer: Megan Kapler
Executive producers: Jeff Skoll, Diane Weyermann, Alex Kwartler, Clare Carter, Hayley Theisen
Editing: Amy Foote, Joe Bini, Brian A. Kates
Music: Soundwalk Collective
Production company: Participant (US)
World sales: Altitude
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition); also in Toronto (TIFF Docs), New York Film Festival, London Film Festival
In English
117 minutes
