During the glorious decade lasting from 1992 to 2002, there were few occupations more lucrative for an Iraqi male of a certain age than professional Saddam Hussein impersonator. While children scrounged for food under the weight of the U.S. embargo and their parents prayed nightly to Allah that another Bush didn't become President of America and really screw things up, stocky, mustachioed men in their late 50s lived the good life, pretending to be the leader of the Ba'ath Party to throw off would-be assassins. But the good life came crashing to a halt in 2006 when, following the invasion and occupation of Iraq by coalition forces, the real Saddam Hussein was executed, and those impersonators without the foresight to plan for an early retirement found themselves out of a job. Even hack actor Jerry Haleva – who appeared as the tyrant of Tikrit in myriad Zucker-Abrahams productions and in The Big Lebowski hasn't worked since 2002.
That all changed when production of the juicy mini-series House of Saddam was announced in 2006. Saddam Hussein himself provided the only possible ending to every biopic when he dangled in front of a cell phone camera on December 30 of that year, and immediately after, writer/director Alex Holmes and his colleagues got to work on producing this mini-series about the intrigues and outrages of the man and his family. A joint production of the BBC and HBO, the series has the pedigree to be well worth watching, and it was pretty well-received in Britain when it first aired this August. My main concern going into it was how it would deal with the political aspects of Saddam Hussein's story. The hook that most critics hug on the mini-series was that it was "The Sopranos go Middle Eastern", which is undeniably fun-sounding, but risks glossing over the fact that the history of Saddam Hussein is inextricably linked with international politics, and it's a convoluted history at that, which, if delved into too deeply, might bore the average viewer, but if glossed over completely, would prove unsatisfying. Which way would they go – dry but damning political legend-building, or sanguine but slick criminal soap opera?
In the early goings, it certainly seems like the latter, although the touchstone – with the back-room standoffs, the cigar-smoking cronies discussing going legit with their business while plotting bloody deeds, and the chilling way people are lured into arranging their own doom – seems to be the Godfather movies rather than The Sopranos. The washed-out, yellowy cinematography by Florian Hoffmeister, which strongly recalls Gordon Willis' work in Francis Ford Coppola's masterpiece, simply drives that point home further. (Even a scene depicting terror attacks in Baghdad by the Islamic Dawa Party deliberately recall the revolving-door assassination scene in The Godfather.) Politics are always present, but they tend to be glossed over rather than explored; anyone lacking the background knowledge of what the Ba'ath Party stood for, how they came to power, and what led to their conflict with the Iranian fundamentalists in the 1980s isn't going to get it here. That level of subtlety, and the general feel that these were people who existed in the context of international politics, is thrown by the wayside in favor of gangster drama dressed in Arabic clothing.
But this isn't necessarily a flaw. After all, dictatorial regimes have always had a sort of gangster quality to them, and if Holmes and company sacrifice a certain political and historical verisimilitude to tell their story of Baghdad as a sort of Mafia stronghold that takes over a whole country, it does give them license to bring in the kind of dramatic scenes that give House of Saddam's cast a chance to show off. Yigal Naor as Saddam Hussein is always terrific, unflappable and calculating with a chilling presence that makes the comparisons with Stalin comprehensible, and he's surrounded by political and military cronies whose combination of film-star flashiness and gutter-dwelling ugliness is straight out of mob-film central casting (Uri Gavriel as "Chemical" Ali Hassan and Amr Waked as Hussein Kamel are the two extreme points on this spectrum, and both are fantastic). As is often the case in gangster films, though, women are the weak spot: an attempt to cast Saddam Hussein's mother (played by a troll-like Izabella Telezynska) as a sort of Livia Soprano character seems to have wandered in from a different movie, and a subplot involving his affair with a blonde schoolteacher goes nowhere.
After the strong-arm stuff in episode I, broken up by the occasional and fascinating bit of period footage like a goofy propaganda cartoon in which a tank takes potshots at a ludicrous caricature of the Ayatollah, politics finally comes center stage in the second installment. The narrative skips ahead a decade, casually mentioning the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in the Iran/Iraq war, and at first we're treated to more family drama: Saddam's sons, Uday and Qusay, have blossomed from ineffectual snots to full-blown vulgar shits, and dad's affair with the schoolteacher, which mostly consisted of her hanging around in hallways looking seductive, has caused a lot of tension at family dinners. Well, that and all the gassing-the-Kurds stuff. After a terrifying interlude featuring Saddam Hussein in a Speedo bathing suit, though, we finally get into the gaming of the invasion of Kuwait.