There were a lot of movies made last year about the current state of the War on Terror; few, if any, though managed to connect with audiences. In the Valley of Elah, now available on home video, is no exception, but really it should have been. Elah is an emotional journey and a personal meditation on the individual costs of war. Based loosely on a true story, the movie examines broader issues of the war while focusing on the comparatively smaller investigation of a father’s grief and a quest to understand how a life lived the same in so many ways, could end up worlds apart.
Tommy Lee Jones plays Hank Deerfield, a career army man now retired and living the quiet life with his wife Joan (Susan Sarandon). Hank gets a call that his son Mike, who followed his father into the service, has gone AWOL after returning from a tour of duty in Iraq. Hank decides to head down to his son’s base to look into the matter, but the missing person’s case becomes a murder investigation when the body of Mike Deerfield is found severed in pieces and burned in a field on the edge of town. Hank teams up with police detective Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron) to find out the truth about his son’s fate.
I think the best selling point in this movie is the Academy Award nominated performance by Tommy Lee Jones. Jones is probably best known for playing cocky, sure-footed men of action with a snap in their step and a take-no-prisoners attitude. All that is absent from his portrayal of Hank Deerfield though. Jones does a lot of expressing with his eyes as he emotes sadness and doubt.
You see internally that he’s asking himself the tough questions: Did he push his son too hard to be career military like him? Is the army that he once dedicated his life to abandoning the men entrusted to it? Hank’s quiet act of protest at the end speaks volumes, as do several little scenes of Hank shining his shoes or making military corners out of the sheets in his hotel room bed. This is a man who has been given so much by the same army that’s now taken two of his sons.
Unfortunately while great attention to detail is paid to Jones and his character, everyone else is kind of underwritten. Sarandon gets saddled with the thankless role of the grieving mom, with which she does her best with considering. Also doing thankless work is Jason Patric as the military investigator whose contributions seem to be obfuscation, denials and the general upholding of military appearances.
As Deerfield’s partner in truth-seeking, Charlize Theron is believable as a single mom who’s out to prove her detecting acumens. Haggis makes a bizarre choice though by dedicating a lot of time to a subplot about how she’s not accepted by the males in her squad because of perceived tokenism. This storyline is beyond pointless and doesn’t offer anything different that can’t be seen any one of a number of Lifetime movies.
Those are kind of minor complaints though because the main portion of the movie, the whodunit story involving the death of Deerfield’s son, is very well handled. Although it should be noted that the story is really a whydunit, an opportunity for writer/director Paul Haggis to explore themes and issues around soldiers and how they cope both in the field and when they return home from combat.
This is no plebiscite though, while the effects of the ongoing war of errors in Iraq are apparent, we also see, through the elder Deerfield, the positive effects that military service can do for a person. I don’t think this movie is either pro- or anti-war, its anti-policy and failure of leadership, which is the reason, aside from the shoty justification to begin with, why Iraq is still a mess almost five years out.
Understated and complex, In the Valley of Elah is an excellent war film that doesn’t deal with the actual war. Filled with thought and pathos, the story, through Tommy Lee Jones, propels the viewer to think beyond the politics and philosophizing to considering the true impact of war and who carries the brunt of what that war truly costs: the soldiers.
