Title: Life of Crime 1984-2020
Director: Jon Alpert
Language: English
Running time: 121'
The United States have engaged in a lot of wars overseas throughout the years, but, statistically, the most deadly one has been the one fought on their own territory: the war on drugs. A war in which the victims are those who have been left alone by their own government and who are helpless against the illness that struck them. Life of crime 1984-2020 is a raw documentary that doesn’t leave any escape to the watcher, who is forced to analyse what kind of society we really live in.
Alpert’s documentary follows three criminals and addicts of Newark, New Jersey: Rob, Freddie and Deliris. We can see them starting with theft and watch them spiral into cocaine and heroin addiction in the suburbs of the biggest city in New Jersey. We watch them get in and out of jail, struggle with addiction, get clean and then fall for it again, fighting and fighting for their freedom. We can see how being inserted again into society with a criminal record and a story of addiction is a bureaucratic mess, which leads them back into their addiction just when they thought they were completely done with it. We really watch them struggle against the same government that was supposed to help them. We see three people who thought they were going to live the American Dream but who are left with nothing, not even their life.
Life of crime 1984-2020 is actually the sum of two of Alpert’s previous documentaries, “A Year in a Life of Crime “ (1989) and “Life of Crime 2” (1998), to which he added the ending that life brought to our protagonists. The images are raw, at times quite disturbing, definitely not a sight for the light hearted. We can see how Alpert created a bond of friendship with Rob, Freddie and Deliris, he tells the story in a completely judgment free manner, and in the end we see how he really wants his friends to get better. The way their story is told is as if we were watching old family videos, portraying our long lost friends. We don’t judge them, we feel for them, we want them to get better, we wish there was something we could do to help them, and, finally, we are left with nothing to do if not get angry at the same government that caused their disappearance and that should have saved them at the same time. The documentary makes us realise how hard it is to get out of these situations, and how fragile and precarious the life of these people is, how a minor inconvenience might mean throwing away years and years spent trying to get better.
Alpert tells the stories of Rob, Freddie and Deliris in a neutral way, asking the spectator to just confront the reality of the American war on drugs. The documentarist wants the audience to draw their own conclusions, but he knows what these will be: we will get sad and angry and feel helpless watching these people ruin their lives because their saviour is their same tormentor. We are put in front of all the hardships that leading a life like theirs encompasses, angered at how those who were supposed to help them were the same ones who abandoned them when they most needed it. Life of crime 1984-2020 is a really eye opening, raw documentary that doesn’t leave any escape to the spectator watching it other than facing the reality of things.
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