House of Saddam

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 (Yigal Naor) as part Tony Soprano, part Michael Corleone, and part Keyser Söze. 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). Ending 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 drew a volatile and unstable region into further turmoil. The series seems to sometimes take its cue from Saddam's reported admiration of The Godfather trilogy: in the first hour, for instance, a coup against Iraq's sitting president is carried out during Saddam's daughter's birthday party. Beyond inferences of an unhappy childhood and a mother who makes Livia on The Sopranos look like June Cleaver, there is little attempt to explore what makes Saddam tick. It is more a bloody portrait of absolute power corrupting absolutely, with no heroes and few sympathetic characters. Saddam's wife (Oscar nominee Shohreh Aghdashloo) becomes increasingly pitiable as she falls from her husband's favor and he takes a married schoolteacher as his mistress (an aide warns the woman's 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, it's apparent that the house of Saddam is crumbing, and in the final hour, after George W. Bush assures the Iraqi people that “the day of your liberation is near,” it finally falls. DVD extras include a featurette on Hussein's regime, with cast and crew interviews. Recommended. (D. Liebenson)