Movie Chile Review

The House I Live In

By: Jennifer Levin
Published online: Monday, November 12, 2012
Appeared in: Pasateimpo

Capsule review

Although it features an impressive range of talking heads, The House I Live In doesn’t tell us anything about the War on Drugs that hasn’t already been covered by documentarians or other members of the media. But if you’re too young to remember the crack epidemic of the 1980s, or it’s never occurred to you that racism and classism play important roles in this particular war, then this movie will be a great primer. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Director Eugene Jarecki is scheduled to attend the Friday, Nov. 9, screening only. Not rated. 108 minutes.

Full Review

The House I Live In, documentary, not rated, The Screen, 2.5 chiles

Although it features an impressive range of talking heads, The House I Live In, Eugene Jarecki’s new documentary about the War on Drugs, doesn’t really tell us anything new. If you’re familiar with the idea that the War on Drugs is used to scapegoat and disenfranchise targeted populations of black and poor people and impose absurdly long prison sentences for nonviolent offenders, while wealthier, whiter users tend to get off easy for the same crimes, you can skip this film. If, however, you are too young to remember the crack epidemic of the 1980s, or it’s never occurred to you that racism and classism play important roles in this particular war, then this movie will be a great primer.

Jarecki narrates the film in a soft-spoken whine that’s unsuited for voice- over. He is joined by notable figures, including Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness; David Simon, the creator of the HBO series The Wire; several professors and journalists who specialize in drug crimes and criminal justice; activists against mandatory minimum sentencing; prison officials who do not agree with official policies; and a range of men and women who have been arrested and/or incarcerated for drug crimes, as well as members of their families. Jarecki’s previous films include Why We Fight and The Trials of Henry Kissinger. The House I Live In, which won the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, was, according to Jarecki, inspired by his relation- ship with his nanny, a black woman named Nannie, and his discovery, as an adult, that her children had fallen prey to drugs. The most important issue addressed in the film is the for-profit prison industry, which relies on the racist and unequal treatment of drug offenders to earn its money and keep entire communities employed. Jarecki’s decision to frame the movie around his relationship to Nannie and her family is weakly supported by the film’s ultimate assertion, which is that the War on Drugs bears resemblance to other periods throughout history when certain cultures, religions, or ethnicities were targeted for extermination, such as Jews in Eastern Europe during the pogroms and the Third Reich. Jarecki’s parents came to the United States to escape these terrors, and in the U.S. they hired Nannie to spend far more time with their children than she did with her own. Jarecki obviously feels some sense of responsibility for what happened to those children, but his grating wide-eyed innocence, as if he’d never before considered American society’s complicity in the racist drug war, makes me wish he’d substituted on-screen text for his personal wonderment.