“THE HOUSE I LIVE IN” My rating: B (Opening Jan. 11 at the Tivoli)
108 minutes | NO MPAA rating
Whatever its noble intentions, the so-called War on Drugs isn’t any closer to ending than it was forty-some years ago when President Richard Nixon took up the cause.
If anything it has proven itself to be a self-perpetuating circus, one that enriches very bad, violent people, while imprisoning hundreds of thousands who should be receiving treatment instead of jail sentences.
Eugene Jarecki, whose documentary output includes “The Trials of Henry Kissinger,” “Freakonomics” and “Why We Fight” (he’s also the brother of Andrew “Capturing the Friedmans” Jarecki), has spent the last five years crisscrossing America to create this powerful, fact-filled and deeply disturbing non-fiction film.
There are plenty of statistics (a telling one: the U.S. imprisons a higher percentage of its population than any other industrialized country, with most of those serving time for drug violations), but “The House I Live In” is remarkable for the personal stories it brings to the table.
Jarecki begins the film on a highly personal note by introducing us to Nannie Jeter, an elderly black woman who was the housekeeper for the Jarecki family when Eugene was young. He played with Nannie’s children; now he checks back in with the family to find it shattered by drugs.
Our nominal guide throughout the movie is TV producer David Simon, a formers journalist who covered the War on Drugs and went on to create the fictional HBO series “The Wire,” which over several seasons explored the dangerous, complicated, exasperating labyrinth of drug use, drug peddling, and drug enforcement in his hometown of Baltimore.
(This was a TV show that during one season had a high-ranking police officer create a no-arrest zone in which drug dealers and users could conduct business in safety; the precipitous decline in street crime wasn’t enough to save the cop from a tidal wave of Calvinism-fueled moral outrage.)
Jarecki’s movie is practically encyclopedic. He talks to cops, addicts, prisoners, jurists, jail guards – even those who believe the War on Drugs is justified can’t argue that they’re accomplishing much.
But far more telling are the subjects who believe that it is less a war on drugs than on poor and black people, most of whom turn to drugs because they’ve got few other pleasures in their lives.
There’s a bleeding-heart quality here, and surely Jarecki could have found someone who would wholeheartedly defend the system. The film feels one-sided.
But by the time “The House I Live In” ends (the title comes from a 1945 patriotic song about America), you’ll be convinced that the damage done by illegal drugs is nothing compared to the damage done by the system created to control illegal drugs.
| Robert W. Butler
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