Tweet

EMAIL

PRINT

Comments (0)

 1 of 2

In the Valley of Elah Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: R (for violent and disturbing content, language and some sexuality/nudity) Genre: Drama Theater release: September 14, 2007 by Warner Independent Pictures Directed by: Paul Haggis Runtime: 2 hours 1 minutes Cast: Tommy Lee Jones (Hank Deerfield), Charlize Theron (Emily Sanders), Susan Sarandon (Joan Deerfield), Jason Patric (Lt. Kirklander), Josh Brolin (Chief Buchwald), Jonathan Tucker (Mike Deerfield), James Franco (Sgt. Carnelli), Frances Fisher (Evie), Devin Brochu (David Sanders) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

Say what you like about Paul Haggis's merits as a writer or director, but he sure does know how to bring together an impressive cast and, in some cases, how to elicit some of their finest work. In the Valley of Elah has generated a lot of buzz for Tommy Lee Jones, who plays the father of an American soldier who goes missing, and then turns up dead, after a tour of duty in Iraq. But while Jones clearly earns all his accolades, you cannot help but notice all the other actors who turn up for small-ish parts here and there: Susan Sarandon as Jones's wife, Josh Brolin as a sleazy police chief, even James Franco in a couple scenes as an army sergeant who answers the phones. (Did he have other scenes that ended up on the cutting-room floor?)

So, credit where credit is due. As Hank and Joan Deerfield, Jones and Sarandon do a masterful job of conveying the grief of two parents who have lost their child and don't know why he died. Actually, it's worse than that: we find out fairly early on that they have lost two children, because they had another son who died in an accident on an army base some years before. And beneath the grief, there is resentment, as Joan accuses her husband, a Vietnam vet, of inspiring her children to join the military and thereby put themselves in harm's way. But the bitter, ironic truth is that, while both of their sons died on Uncle Sam's payroll, neither of them was killed on the battlefield. They died when they should have been safe.

Tommy Lee Jones as Hank Deerfield

Their second son met a particularly gruesome fate—stabbed, dismembered, burned, and the pieces of his body left in a field to be pecked at by animals—so Hank sets out to find out who killed his boy. But everywhere he looks, there is bureaucratic wrangling and callous indifference. The police are happy to let the army claim jurisdiction over the case, and the army lieutenant (Jason Patric) in charge of the case only lets out so much information. So Hank takes matters into his own hands and turns to a local police officer, Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron), for assistance—and she, in turn, has to deal with sexist colleagues and higher-ranking officers who are ex-military and therefore not inclined to help her interfere with the army.

Their investigation, and thus the film, paints an increasingly negative picture of the military in general, and even, alas, of Hank's son Mike (Jonathan Tucker). It turns out that Mike and his friends frequented strip joints and spent time with hookers back home, and they took drugs, tortured people and killed innocent civilians in Iraq; what's more, they documented at least some of their misdeeds with their cell-phone cameras. Indeed, nearly every soldier we meet turns out to be either a screw-up with something to hide or a bureaucrat who wants to keep things hidden.

Susan Sarandon as Joan Deerfield

Lest we miss the point, Haggis throws in a few extra elements to ram home the idea that there is something profoundly wrong with the military. Emily alludes to the trauma her father experienced in war, and the only identifiably married soldier we encounter—someone not directly involved with the murder case—turns out to be at least as messed up as the other, single and unattached, soldiers.

But there's a problem with this relentlessly negative portrayal. Hank is supposed to be the pair of eyes through which we encounter all these problems; he is the character who undergoes a profound shift in sensibility as a result of what he sees; he is the character who is supposed to embody America's disillusionment with the Iraq War. But he has served in the army, too—in Vietnam, no less—so he shouldn't be surprised by the fact that soldiers are capable of this sort of behavior. Indeed, the traumas and atrocities that we see here took place even in so-called "good wars"—a fact that Haggis already rammed home in his screenplays for Clint Eastwood's World War II epics Flags of our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima.

Charlize Theron as Detective Emily Sanders

We are told that Mike and his comrades served together in Bosnia before they were stationed in Iraq. So we don't even need to appeal to the precedent of previous generations of conflict; all we need to do is ask what it is in the personal experience of these characters that makes Iraq such a uniquely worse place than, say, the Balkans. And the film offers no hint, beyond one character's casual assertion that Iraq is "f---ed up." This is not exactly as helpful or insightful as it could be.

next page... |  1 of 2 | last page