Newsweek: New Iraq Film Hard to Ignore

[David Morgan (MAMS)]

Newsweek - Sep 6, 2007
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20629908/site/newsweek/?from=rss

New Iraq Film Hard to Ignore

In his first film since the Oscar-winning 'Crash,' Paul Haggis takes on
the Iraq war"with a little help from Tommy Lee Jones

By David Ansen
Newsweek

Sept. 6, 2007 - Tommy Lee Jones may have the most eloquently ravaged
face in current American movies. He looks like a man who's tread too
many miles of bad road, and his journey in Paul Haggis's "In the Valley
of Elah" is a tough, mournful one. As Hank Deerfield, a former military
MP, he learns that his son, who has returned from a tour of duty in
Iraq, has gone missing and is reported AWOL. Leaving behind his
distraught wife (Susan Sarandon), he drives from Tennessee to Fort
Rudd, in Texas, to investigate. It isn't long before he's confronted
with the worst: his son's body, chopped into pieces, has been found in
a field.

Haggis's first film since his Oscar-winning "Crash" is a much more
straightforward affair than that facile exercise in dubious sociology.
It unfolds as a murder mystery: one fraught with an angry, sorrowful
political subtext and a tone that's unvaryingly solemn. Deerfield is
joined in his investigation by an inexperienced police investigator,
Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron), whose own efforts are to solve the
case are thwarted by her sexist colleagues, who are happy to cede
jurisdiction over the murder to the military. Deerfield, a tough,
tenacious man, doesn't trust anyone but himself to get the
investigation right.

The considerable power of the film is contained in Jones's hard-bitten,
movingly understated performance. His rage and sorrow rarely break the
surface, but you feel its constant presence lurking behind his
devastated eyes. Deerfield senses, and so does the viewer, that his
son's murder is linked to what happened to the boy in Iraq. On his
son's cell phone, there are chaotic, confusing video fragments that
suggest the combat atrocities that have appeared in dozens of Iraq
documentaries and that pop up daily in our newspapers. "In the Valley
of Elah" is deeply felt, but its revelations and plot twists aren't
likely to shock or surprise anyone who's been paying attention to the
physical and psychic price our soldiers have been paying in the war. As
a murder mystery, Haggis's story (which a title informs us is "inspired
by true events") doesn't generate much suspense"it's almost as if
Haggis felt that emphasizing thrills would be unseemly, and would
disturb his self-consciously elegiac tone.

There's nothing wrong with Theron's performance as the single mom
detective who struggles to gain Deerfield's respect while showing up
the good old boys in her office, but the role feels ornamental, a
concession to Hollywood convention. It's the casting of Iraq vet and
non-professional Jake McLaughlin as Specialist Bonner, who fought
alongside Deerfield's son in Iraq, that strikes a deeper emotional
chord. His scenes with Jones, fraught with a complicated mix of
bitterness, concern and guilt, are the best things in the movie. "In
the Valley of Elah""one of many American movies this fall that will
weigh in on Iraq, Afghanistan and the unholy mess we've made in the
Middle East"is far more successful than the clumsily written "Home of
the Brave" in dealing with the trauma of our returning soldiers, but
it's far from the last word on the subject. It's an impassioned
personal testament that sits not uneasily inside a conventional genre
format. But whatever its flaws, Haggis's movie sends out an urgent
signal of distress that's hard to ignore.

(c) 2007 MSNBC.com

*