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Chelsea: Arts & Lifestyles In The Valley of Elah
Courtesy of Warner Independent Pictures Tommy Lee Jones and Susan Sarandon star in Paul Haggis’ “In The Valley of Elah.” From ‘Crash’ to another moving diaster By Steven Snyder It’s Paul Haggis’ sincerity that gets him into trouble with a small but vocal corner of the critical establishment. His work is layered in a sense of conviction that makes him an easy target for anyone who considers his films overly sentimental or overtly naïve. But for those who enjoy the way he integrates relatively groundbreaking discussions within conventional formulas — a growing number of fans that include this reviewer — the director has found a way to satisfy studio executives while taking his films in new and unexpected directions. Just consider the four most recent Haggis vehicles: He wrote “Million Dollar Baby,” where a conventional boxing tale merged into a discussion of euthanasia and moral responsibility; he wrote and directed the best picture winner, “Crash,” which attempted to tackle the tricky subject of racism within the confines of the white-washed Hollywood; he wrote “The Last Kiss,” which took a ho-hum Zach Braff romantic comedy and set it on a far more risqué trajectory of infidelity; and he wrote the last, and best, James Bond film, “Casino Royale,” which gave the martini-sipper a never-before-seen range of emotion. These are great, and more importantly, interesting films. And in a similar fashion, Haggis’ latest film is a moving, considerate, heartfelt story about the ways in which our latest war is destroying so many young men and women charged with venturing off to the deserts of Iraq. Barely touching on the politics surrounding the American-led war on terror, Haggis sets the story back in the states, less concerned with politicians or battlefields than in the struggles being faced by one middle-class family that is simply waiting for their son to return from Iraq. Early one morning, Hank (Tommy Lee Jones) receives the call: His son has returned from overseas duty, but has gone missing from his Texas base. A long-time commissioned officer himself, he packs his bag, kisses his wife (Susan Sarandon, in an emotional performance) goodbye and takes the pickup truck down to find his boy, driving right up to the gates of his old base. What he finds there startles him. Through his son’s abandoned cell phone, he retrieves videos that show a young man struggling to cope with the horrors of war. Through his conversations with Detective Sanders (Charlize Theron), a local detective, he starts to appreciate the ways in which civilian jurisdiction butts head with the military police. Through the discovery of a mutilated body along the side of a rural highway, he starts to see the indicators of a cover-up, and through his own investigation of how those Iraq videos led to his son’s demise, he comes to realize just how much the army, engaged in this war, differs from his own past experiences. At the film’s center, keeping the story grounded in the wounded heart of a stoic and stubborn man, is a resolute and fiery calm Tommy Lee Jones, who works within the tight emotional range of a career soldier to portray the anxiety of a terrified father. Charlize Theron serves as his foil, the ambivalent and frustrated detective who is eventually forced by Hank to confront the true injustice playing out in front of her eyes. While the surface story is the stuff of Hollywood convention, focusing on a missing person and a murder investigation, that surface drama is merely a mask for the film’s real subject: the way that these deaths in Iraq ripple into waves of devastation for families back home. And not just in the sense of a dead family member, but in the way Hank starts to finally comprehend the new kinds of horrors his son faced overseas, the ways those horrors have changed the other men and women in his son’s unit, and the disconnect that exists between those inside this military and those unaware of what they’re going through. The film’s title stems from the classic story, of David and Goliath waging battle in the Valley of Elah — the tale of heroism that one generation passes down to the other, steeped in all the traditional iconography of courage, bravery and triumph. It’s the kind of story that fathers tell sons to illustrate the kind of warrior mentality they should aspire toward, leading young men to want to hoist a gun and prove their worth. In a quiet corner of the country, at the volume of a lullaby, “In the Valley of Elah” is a cautionary tale about one retired soldier slowly unlearning this fairy tale.
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