2.5/10 Undeservedly but unsurprisingly nominated for Best Documentary Feature and losing at this year’s Academy Award ceremony to “Navalny” (review coming soon), “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” is everything wrong with Hollywood today as it promotes degeneracy and wreaks of hypocrisy. Before I get into the pros and (mostly) cons of this overrated debacle, for those who don’t know or have never heard of this movie, the synopsis is as follows; “Follows the life of artist Nan Goldin and the downfall of the Sackler family, the pharmaceutical dynasty who was greatly responsible for the opioid epidemic’s unfathomable death toll.” Solely based upon that description you would think that Goldin is some larger than life hero who brought a pharmaceutical dynasty to their knees and is the best of us. However, the more you learn about Goldin and the more you realize this documentary is more about her than the battle against big pharma, the more you see this movie crumble. While Goldin obviously didn’t direct this herself (Laura Poitras, who made the amazing Oscar winning documentary “Citizenfour” has that dishonor), she had to agree to be a part of this documentary and allow herself to be followed around and filmed and the problem with how much creative input she had makes the movie feel more about her, the artist and individual than the movement of fighting against big pharma, which makes this feel pretentious and self aggrandizing. One positive aspect I will give Poitras credit for is how across the (overly long) two hour run time of the movie how she shows the (then) current fight against the Sacklers and then flashes back to Goldin’s early days, working her way through the years. While that was a smart directorial choice instead of telling everything chronologically, one problem is that the flashbacks never fully bring us up to the current Sackler battle. There is a gap in time in Goldin’s life which remains unaccounted for. But I give Poitras credit for mixing things up in the timeline and providing a soundtrack that puts you right in the correct frame of mind for the time period and the story being told. All of this brings me to the many problems, however, mainly which is Goldin herself. Goldin is in the New York art scene which in addition to being pretentious in and of itself, was incredibly unimpressive to me. While I certainly understand that certain forms of art are not for everyone, the art shown in the movie from her and others who she compliments just felt like garbage to me. Taking pictures of a girl on her bed, a man looking into a camera or a man’s penis is not art. The work ranged from boring (everyday, mundane acts) to pornographic. My own personal complaints aside, as we learn about her backstory, we begin to get into the massive hypocrisy on display. At one point in the story, Goldin talks about not wanting to dance/strip at a New York club because the women there were topless, so she worked at a New Jersey club where the women could keep their tops on. Flash forward probably five minutes and she then goes on to work as a prostitute in an actual whorehouse. So she wasn’t ok with showing her boobs while dancing at a New York club but she was perfectly fine selling her entire body to strangers for money, in addition to showing photos of her naked/having sex? The lack of logic/common sense is palpable. Yet the worst example is when it comes to her entire battle against the Sacklers. Goldin becomes an opioid addict and nearly dies. Once she finally breaks free of her opioid addiction, she makes it her goal to get the Sackler name (since the family has donated tons of money) off of various art museums from around the globe. She markets her battle as a selfless one that she fights because of the hundreds of thousands who have died from addictive opioids. The big problem with this is how carelessly she enjoyed cocaine, speed and countless other drugs, which have killed far more people over the course of time, including some of her acquaintances. A moral, rational person would call out the drug dealers and people pushing meth, heroin, cocaine, etc. which has ravaged cities like New York City for decades and decades. But not only does she not have one negative thing to say about people who profit off of selling those deadly drugs and only cares about OxyContin because it directly impacted her, but she actively advocates for “safe spaces” for people to continue doing these harmful and life destroying drugs, instead of getting them clean. Her radical, far left “solutions” continue to result in more death and “safe spaces” for drug addicts to continue to do drugs will never solve any addict’s problems. While I may have had some sympathy for Goldin based upon her horrible parents and childhood troubles, she has chosen to live a hypocritical, immoral, shallow life, pretending to help others but mainly getting her name out there so her mediocre art can make more of a profit. While the documentary ends before getting into the entire Covid pandemic, based off of her far left, insane politics, I am sure the same Goldin complaining about big pharma killing people was happy to make big pharma rich as Hell by forcing rushed, experimental, unsafe vaccines upon the world. I can’t think of a worse person to make a documentary on and any of the talents that Poitras has are completely wasted here.
#AGoldinCalf / #AllTheFruityAndTheStudsDead / #GiveAwayThePharma / #SadSackler / #AIDSInManhattan / #TheGoldinGirls
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