You’d think that HBO, the network that for seven seasons gave us a perfectly pitched story of the personal and professional life of a criminal monster, would have done a better job with the story of Saddam Hussein, but House of Saddam, a four-part miniseries that begins airing Sunday, disappoints. The son of an interfering mother, the husband of an ambitious wife, the father of ungrateful children (one a flat-out psychopath), and brutal tyrant to a region, Saddam could have been Tony Soprano, only with less pasta. Unfortunately, this Saddam also lacks charm, and in a real sense, motivation. Okay, he wants power, but apart from some references to a dad who was brutal when he wasn’t neglectful, there’s little to tell us what Saddam wants to accomplish and why he wants to accomplish it. There are some brief suggestions about what this series could have been–in one scene, Saddam takes his young son Uday hunting, and Uday complains about the heat. “Of course it’s hot!” an exasperated Saddam replies. “We’re in the desert! Drink some water!” But little of that inner man surfaces. Instead, we get a lot of roaring and glowering and scowling, two borad dimensions in dire need of an enlivening third. Next week’s installments, which are longer dramatic pieces about the betrayal of Saddam by his sons-in-law, and about the overthrow of Saddam, are better, but would have been more dramtic had the characters been more fully brought to life in the fist episodes. Couldn’t they have put some ducks in his pool? (For what it’s worth, it’s always nice to see the brilliant and beautiful Shoreh Aghdashloo, here playing Mrs. Saddam.)
