When director Laura Poitras’ documentary “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” snagged the top prize at this year’s Venice Film Festival, in a field of qualifying titles including “Tár” and “The Banshees of Inisherin,” accusations of contrarian virtue-signaling were flung hither and yon, in some cases even by people who’d actually managed to see it.
Well, those people weren’t right. The film is a gem — a supple, unpredictably structured and deeply personal portrait of its primary subject, the photographer, visual artist and activist Nan Goldin.
And that isn’t all. This portrait belongs to a much larger societal landscape. Poitras’ film expands, naturally, by way of Goldin’s own history and her more recent history of both addiction and effective public dissent, as “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” becomes a tale of the opioid epidemic (roughly 500,000 dead in the U.S. alone), which was and is a human-made tragedy.
