The House I Live In

Eugene Jarecki’s sprawling documentary about the war on drugs takes about an hour to focus itself from a disorganized mess into a cohesive and thoughtful film, but once it does it is very effective. Jarecki (director of Why We Fight and The Trials of Henry Kissinger) makes the all-too-common mistake of taking on a huge subject--far too big for a 2 hour documentary--and then trying to humanize and personalize what should be a film about hard facts and undisputable history. Jarecki spends the first hour of the film gathering perspectives from everyone: dealers and narcs, prisoners and prison guards, professors and activists, and tough-talking politicians from both sides of the aisle. It rapidly starts to feel like a hodge-podge of perspectives and statistics that aren’t going to add up to anything. Much like Davis Guggenheim’s frustratingly unfocused 2010 doc Waiting For Superman, this film feel feels like it will be nothing but a bunch of stirring but challengeable anecdotes standing in for facts and information.

Jarecki structures his film around moving interviews with a black woman who worked for his family when he was very young. He uses reconnecting with her as the motivation for making the film. What this woman, Nannie Jeter, has to say is quite effective but feels like it should be a different, more personal film--either a small documentary or a fiction film based on her story. But as eight or ten minutes of this larger film, her story just feels small, and while related to the larger subject, is slightly off topic as well. Jarecki seems to feel the audience needs an emotional connection to him and to this woman in order to accept the rest of the information in the film and that is too bad, because it has the opposite effect of making the film feel less universally-relevant then it should.

However, when Jarecki stops asking unfocused questions and starts to explore the political, historical and economic aspects of the America’s 30+ year war on drugs, the film really starts to click. The stories and views of the people we have gotten to know over the first part of the film begin to clarify the historical and statistical information the film is conveying.

The film is fairly free of the charts, graphs and other visual tools that these types of documentaries often rely far too heavily upon and, thank God, there are no simple-minded pop-culture clips interwoven to illustrate the film’s points. Instead, Jarecki and editor Paul Frost use the intelligent commentary of their interview subjects to make the case as to why the drug war has failed completely in its stated goal of minimizing the amount of drug abuse in America, and has instead become a huge political and economic engine. The term “prison-industrial complex” is never uttered by anyone in the film but the point is clearly made, and comparisons to the Holocaust made by more than one interviewee come off not as hysterical hyperbole but credible commentary. By the end, the film has successfully presented a well-rounded look at this very complicated national issue. At a time when so many documentaries are nothing more than biased propaganda, this is a real work of journalistic cinema.