European Films

In the Valley of Elah David slew Goliath and Canadian director Paul Haggis tries to slay the US myth on the Good War in Iraq, though David was certainly more successful than Paul. The message that the American people and military families in particular are affected by and dissatisfied with the Second Iraqi War feels old and the idea of The Good War does not really need to be slayed anymore. The screenplay by the director never touches a raw nerve that could bring some sparkle to an otherwise odd mix of patriotism and criticism of contemporary US society. Like the director’s previous film Crash, it is likely to receive mixed reactions and do middling-to-good business, though acting awards could be in the cards for protagonist Tommy Lee Jones.

 

Tommy Lee Jones’s handsomely aged parchment-over-bones face perfectly fits the role of Hank Deerfield, a stern retired army veteran. Deerfield’s second son Mike has not reported back home even though his army unit returned to base from duty in Iraq, worrying Hank and his wife Joan (Susan Sarandon in a thankless role) to the point of Hank’s departure for some private investigating, convinced that the army and police are not up to the task. After finding little information at the army base itself, he turns to Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron, convincing) from the local police force close to the army base, who reluctantly helps him -- especially after a body turns up in what could be her jurisdiction.

 

Like in Crash, the film tries to paint a picture of a society in which not some or even most elements are related or tangentially related to the subject matter, but all matters are directly linked to the film’s core themes. As such, the US as presented by Haggis in Crash and again here feels like a vacuum-pumped version of the real world, where no other matters exist than those relevant for the story and, in this case, all TV and radio stations talk about nothing but the war in Iraq 24 hours a day.

 

Another example: Joan and Hank also had an older child called David, who – seen from the point of view of the Haggis universe – died in an appropriate way, while Emily is a single mother with a child also named David. To underline these points and tie everything neatly together, Lee Jones is given an awkwardly funny scene in which he tries to tell the story of David and Goliath in the Valley of Elah as a bedtime story to Emily’s little David, giving him a replacement son with the same biblical name as his own dead son. Subtlety is something else.

 

A nice touch (and also a key component of Brian De Palma’s Iraqi War drama Redacted) is the importance of video footage in the world of today, be it footage shot in Iraq first-hand by soldiers on their camera-phones or the countless miles of video footage shot by security cameras at home, forever prying the masses for faces of possible terrorists or criminals. The way Haggis times Hank’s painful one-by-one access to his son’s video files on his cell phone, however, reeks of audience manipulation, while the film's outcome is largely due to several last-minute plot developments that include an awkwardly staged chase by car and on foot.

 

That people in the US seem generally dissatisfied with the war in Iraq is not something that should come as a revelation, so why Haggis has chosen to stage it that way is something of a riddle (a supposedly shocking statement from a returned soldier runs "They shouldn't send heroes to Iraq, the should just nuke the place"). Two awkward scene involving a US flag hoisted by an unknowing though not unfriendly janitor from El Salvador points more directly to a kind of ambivalence on Haggis's part to still bask in the glory of US patriotism even if in reality it seems that the US government does little to deserve its soldiers' unyielding allegiance (fathers need to find out about missing sons for themselves!)  

 

What makes the whole film bearable is the performance of Tommy Lee Jones, who is on-screen for almost the entire film and who really sells his character of a tough father who nevertheless would do anything for his son. Theron ably supports him in an underwritten and predictable role; as the only female in the police department, her scene that spells the triumph over her male colleagues can be seen coming from miles away. Other supporting players are nothing more than that; Sarandon is mainly there to say "Goodnight" on the phone to her husband who is out and about for his investigation and to cry on cue when the film's overly bombastic score might have failed to have audiences reach for their Kleenexes.