VIEW: In the Valley of Elah Photos

PREMIERE'S REVIEW (posted 9/14/07)

You couldn't get any farther from the speechifying characters of Paul Haggis's multi-Oscar winning Crash than Hank Deerfield, the extremely taciturn retired soldier played by Tommy Lee Jones in writer-director Haggis' In the Valley of Elah. When Deerfield's man of action discovers that his son, back from Iraq, has gone AWOL from his home base, he hops into his pickup truck — well, not hop; this is a character who moves quite deliberately — with nary a word to his wife (Sarandon) and drives to the base full of blood and guts and thunder and pride that his son has worked to "bring democracy to a shithole." What he subsequently sees there shatters all of his illusions in ways almost too terrible to imagine. (Making the fact that the picture is based on a real-life case almost unbearable.) By setting Elah in a sere, seedy outpost of the home front — the base is surrounded by strip bars and BBQ shacks, all elegiacally captured by cinematographer Roger Deakins — rather than in Iraq (the country only appears in a series of phone videos made by Hank's son that gradually reveal the horrors of what he did and saw there) Haggis shows how painfully war distorts, mutates, and deranges the people who fight in it, and what happens when the derangement makes it way back to America.

With largely impeccable script and direction, Elah shows off Haggis's storytelling chops with none of the spot-on-pontificating that made Crash so squirm-worthy. Instead, what we get here is a sophisticated narrative structure that only sporadically reveals, in pieces of camera-phone video rescued gradually, what happened to Deerfield's son during his sojourn in Iraq. In Elah, this device doesn't play out in nearly as self-conscious and ostentatious a way as the hobbled La Ronde–based form of Crash did. The star-studded cast performs superbly, including Charlize Theron, who is almost unrecognizable as a police investigator aiding Deerfield and obviously restrained by Haggis who somehow managed to excise the air of self-righteous entitlement usually seen in her acting.

Nonetheless, after proving that he's pretty damn good at showing rather than telling and at delivering a good, often wrenching, entirely pertinent film in the process, Haggis blows it with an already-much-discussed final sequence so grotesquely literal that it almost destroys all the good work that came before. In my cut of the film, it ends after Jones opens the parcel from his son that's been sitting on his kitchen table since shortly after he left. I recommend viewers leave the theater at that point. You won't be sorry that you did.

— Glenn Kenny