House of Saddam

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Product Description

House of Saddam (DVD)

Amazon.com

In this gripping four-hour docudrama, any resemblance between Saddam Hussein and a certain New Jersey mob boss may not be a coincidence. Co-produced by the BBC and broadcast on HBO, House of Saddam portrays Saddam (Igal Naor) as part Tony Soprano, part Michael Corleone, and part Keyzer Soze. Early on, he ruthlessly kills his closest friend to intimidate his enemies (“The man who can sacrifice even his best friend is a man without weakness,” he rationalizes to his wife). Framed by America’s invasion of Iraq, and concluding with Saddam’s capture in that now-infamous hole, House of Saddam chronicles the rise and fall of a tyrant, whose decades of deceit and cruelty devastated a nation and threw the volatile and unstable region into further turmoil. In some scenes, House of Saddam takes its cue from Saddam’s reported admiration of the Godfather films. In the first hour, a coup against Iraq’s sitting president is carried out during Saddam’s daughter’s birthday party. Soon after, Saddam puts a wicked twist on the Corleone maxim about keeping your friends close and your enemies closer. In Saddam’s version, it’s keep your friends close and your enemies close enough for your friends to shoot point blank. Beyond inferences of an unhappy childhood and a mother who makes Livia on The Sopranos look like June Cleaver, there is scant attempt to psychoanalyze Saddam or explore what makes him tick. It is more a portrait etched in blood of power corrupting absolutely. There are no heroes and few sympathetic characters in this House. Saddam’s wife (Oscar-nominee Shoreh Aghdashloo) is an increasingly pitiable object as she falls from her husband’s favor and he takes a married schoolteacher as his mistress (an aide warns her husband not to object, promising “compensation”). Philip Arditti is chilling as Saddam’s eldest son, Uday, a psychopathic rapist and murderer, who gives even his father pause. By the third hour, when Saddam is making a copy of the Quran written in his own blood, the writing is on the wall for this megalomaniac. In the final hour, as we watch George Bush on TV assuring the Iraqi people that “the day of your liberation is near,” we can’t help cheering, “What are you waiting for?” –Donald Liebenson