In The Valley Of Elah

Forgive me if this seems a little incoherent, you see it turns out when you watch In the Valley of Elah, Paul Haggis actually sneaks up behind you with a tack hammer and pounds your skull repeatedly screaming at the top of his lungs, "do you get it? the Iraq war is evil, evil I say, America is in trouble, we must rescue it". Still, if I had been able to get my senses back fast enough I probably would have asked for an autograph. Now whether Mr. Haggis is write about Iraq maybe right, but what it is with regards to this movie is really completely irrelevant.

Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones) gets a call one day that his son is AWOL. Hank wasn't even aware that his son was home. Hank sets out to his son's base to find him. Soon the missing person becomes a murder victim and Hank, a former MP can't restrain himself from finding out exactly what happened. He is assisted (or is he assisting her?) by local detective Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron). They slowly piece together what happened while Hank becomes disillusioned by the army, Iraq and just about everything else.

Now the reason I say Iraq is completely irrelevant is because this movie could just as easily have been set in the Vietnam era or any war really. Its about PTSD, not war. Or at least it should be and would have been if a more subtle director had been at the helm. That being said, Tommy Lee Jones knocks his performance out of the park. From his stoic army trained lifestyle that has him neatly making his hotel room bed each morning to his pained by almost passionless reaction to his own son's dead body.

Despite Haggis' heavy hand, I felt the movie was pretty effective and anchored by Jones performing like crazy. I'm the first to raise holy hell that Jones won an academy award over Ralph Fiennes many years back but maybe I should give him another chance because he has wowed me twice now, here and in Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Sadly the film just doesn't seem to know when it should end, or rather Haggis doesn't seem to know when it should end.