Paul Haggis’ “In the Valley of Elah” is built on Tommy Lee Jones’ persona, and that is why it works so well. The same material could have been banal or routine with an actor trying to be “earnest” and “sincere.”
Jones isn’t trying to be anything at all. His character is simply compelled to do what he does, and has a lot of experience doing it.
He plays a Vietnam veteran named Hank Deerfield, now hauling gravel in Tennessee. He gets a call from the Army that his son Mike, just returned from a tour in Iraq, is AWOL from his squad at Fort Rudd. That sounds wrong. He tells his wife, Joan (Susan Sarandon), that he’s going to drive down there and take a look into things.
His investigations in the area of Fort Rudd take him into topless bars, chicken shacks, the local police station, the base military police operation and a morgue where he’s shown something cut into pieces and burned, and he IDs the remains as his son. Looking through his son’s effects, he asks as a distraction if he can have his Bible while he’s pocketing his son’s cellphone. It’s been nearly destroyed by heat, but a friendly technician salvages some video from it, filled with junk artifacts but still retaining bits of what it recorded on video: glimpses of hell.
To describe the many avenues of his investigation would be pointless and diminish the film’s gathering tension. I’d rather talk about what Haggis, also the writer and co-producer, does with the performance. Imagine the first violinist playing a note to lead the orchestra into tune.
Haggis, as director, draws that note from Jones, and the other actors tune to it. They include Charlize Theron as a city homicide detective, Jason Patric as a military policeman and Sarandon as Deerfield’s wife.
None of these characters are heightened. None of them behave in any way as if they’re in a thriller. Other directors might have pumped them up.
Not here. Theron, who is actually the co-star, so carefully modulates her performance that she even ignores most of the sexism aimed at her at the police station.She simply does her job and raises her young son.
The movie is about determination, doggedness, duty and the ways a war changes a man. There is no release or climax at the end, just closure. Even the final dramatic gesture only says exactly what Deerfield explained earlier that it says, and nothing else.
That tone follows through to the movie’s consideration of the war itself. Those who call “In the Valley of Elah” anti- Iraq-war will not have been paying attention. It doesn’t give a damn where the war is being fought. Hank Deerfield isn’t politically opposed to the war. He just wants to find out how his son came all the way home from Iraq and ended up in charred pieces in a field.
Paul Haggis is making good films these days. He directed “Crash” and wrote “Million Dollar Baby,” both Oscar winners, and was nominated as co-writer of “Letters From Iwo Jima.” He and his casting directors assembled an ideal ensemble for this film, which doesn’t sensationalize but just digs and digs into our apprehensions.
I have been trying to think who else could have carried this picture except Tommy Lee Jones, and I just can’t do it. Who else could tell Theron’s young son the story of David and Goliath (which took place in the Valley of Elah) and make it sound like instruction in the tactics of being brave?
“The Valley of Elah” | **** RATING
R for violent and disturbing content, language and some sexuality/nudity | 2 hours | DRAMA | Written and directed by Paul Haggis; photography by Roger Deakins; starring Tommy Lee Jones, Charlize Theron, Susan Sarandon, James Franco, Jonathan Tucker, Frances Fisher, Jason Patric, Josh Brolin | Opens today at area theaters
