In the Valley of Elah

I'll start by saying what this film is not: a devastating excoriation of the U.S.'s involvement in Iraq. The names Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are never mentioned, neither is Abu Ghraib or any of the other inflammatory touchstone words that have divided this country in the last few years. This came as something as a surprise to me, since before I saw the film I heard writer/director Paul Haggis interviewed on NPR and he described himself as "left of Mao."

What this film is: a well-made, somber whodunit, that tells us how tough if it is to be a combat veteran. I admired this film, but it didn't exactly move me, because it isn't telling us anything new about the psychological damage from war that films going back to The Best Years of Our Lives haven't told us. Haggis, of course, is an incredibly obvious filmmaker. Million Dollar Baby, Flags of Our Fathers, Crash--all scripts that have varying degrees of success, but all about as subtle as a sonic boom.

In the Valley of Elah (the title comes from the Biblical story of David, and is an incredibly forced metaphor) tells the story of Hank Deerfield, played by Tommy Lee Jones. His son is just back from a tour in Iraq, and has gone AWOL. Hank was in the service as well, an MP back in Vietnam. He drives from his home in Tennessee to the base in New Mexico, leaving behind his wife, played by Susan Sarandon. No one on the base seems to know where the son went, so Jones reaches out to the local police, in the person of Charlize Theron as a detective. She tells him it's the military's jurisdiction, but everything changes when his son is found dead--burned and mutilated.

The rest of the film is a rather stale mystery, as Jones and Theron sift through clues to find out what happened to his son. There are a few red herrings, and the standard device of unfolding clues, as a phone expert salvages videos from the son's cell phone. The resolution of the mystery isn't anything more dramatic or clever than a typical episode of NCIS, but admittedly Haggis has bigger fish to fry, and I suspect a crackerjack whodunit was not his primary goal.

Instead Haggis wants us to see the events of this film as a result of the senselessness of war, and here he fails. Like I said, this has been told many times before. All Quiet on the Western Front, the Best Years of Our Lives, Grand Illusion, the list goes on and on. War sucks, we all know it. He's tried to stack the deck by making Jones' protagonist a military man, who probably had no problem supporting the war in Iraq (although he is given no dialogue to indicate that). He's the kind of man who sees a flag flying upside down at a public building and stops to explain to the maintenance man the error of his ways. Jones is very good in this role--his picture could go next to the definition of "taciturn" in the dictionary. Instead of words Jones does remarkable work with his facial expression. In the scene where he finds out what happened to his son, Jones' face is completely devoid of color, withdrawn and haggard, without anger but with profound sorrow. Of course, I'm sure he was aided by makeup and lighting, but I thought it remarkable anyway. An Oscar nomination would be well-deserved.

I think the most interesting character in this film, though, is Theron's detective. Haggis has created a subplot for her. She is a single mother and is constantly belittled by her male colleagues, who accuse her of sleeping her way into the job. She is dedicated, but not a superwoman (she tells her superior, smugly played by Josh Brolin, that she doesn't have a career, she has a job). Theron, who seems to want everyone to forget that she is one of the world's most beautiful women, again deglamorizes herself, her hair a natural nondescript brown, wearing utilitarian clothes from Target. It would be easy to scoff at a glamorous woman going grunge, but I have to admit she's a fine actress and does excellent work here. If this were a mystery novel I would be interested in seeing her character reappear in a series.