In his long movie career, Tommy Lee Jones has never wasted a word or an emotion. When he’s silent, his glinting eyes and suppressed smile suggest a secret held in reserve. When he speaks, at Gatling-gun speed, the words come out as definitive. There’s no arguing with this man; he doesn’t give you an opening. He says only what he wants to say, and he delivers his lines with commanding off-kilter intonations (rising when you would expect falling, or just deadpan). Jones is the driest and most thoroughly stylized of American movie stars—a natural-born hipster wit—but he’s not a lightweight. Even in a spoof like “Men in Black,” his ease and quickness carried authority (and he didn’t let the grinning Will Smith ace him out). In Paul Haggis’s “In the Valley of Elah,” Jones plays a Vietnam vet and former M.P., Hank Deerfield, whose son, Mike, after serving in Iraq, has gone AWOL in America. Jones has portrayed military men before, but Hank Deerfield is the role of a lifetime, and he has stripped himself of any vestige of vanity to play it. The vertical lines in his face run deeper than ever; a ten-dollar haircut exposes his big ears. Suddenly, he’s a primal American image—awkwardly iconic, with a creased-leather face from a Depression photograph—and he gives a great, selfless, and heartbreaking performance that completely dominates this elusive but powerful movie. Haggis, the writer-director of “Crash,” has done something shrewd: he has mounted a devastating critique of the Iraq war by indirection. Rather than dramatizing, say, the disillusion of a young soldier as he experiences the chaos of the occupation, he has moved disillusion into the soul of a military father. And the anguish that the father feels is all the more affecting because it’s held in check by Jones’s natural reticence.
When Hank hears that Mike (Jonathan Tucker) is missing, he says no more than a few words to his wife, Joan (Susan Sarandon), then drives from their home in Tennessee to Fort Rudd, in New Mexico, where he meets with members of his son’s unit, who are polite but reveal nothing. A few days later, the boy’s body, gruesomely burned and dismembered, turns up in a field near the base. In creating the story, Haggis began with an actual murder—the death of Specialist Richard Davis, in 2003, as reported by Mark Boal in a sombre Playboy article published in May, 2004. Working with Boal, Haggis changed the military base and the name of the family, added material from other true stories culled from vets, and expanded the father’s role in tracking down his son’s killers. After Hank calls his wife (the telephone exchange between a stoical Jones and a distraught Sarandon is a short, tragic movie in itself), he responds to the loss as a military man. He makes the bed in his cheap motel with tight hospital corners, and he uses his M.P.’s skills to find out what happened. The meaning of his son’s life, his own life, and the war itself may lie in the solution to the crime. In this search, he has no more than an uncertain ally: Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron), a single mother and a police detective, who apparently got her job after having an affair with her boss and has to face the derision of the male officers on the force.
Haggis has added elements of movie mythmaking to the real-life stories. Hank’s quest may remind you of earlier patriarchs played by John Wayne (in “The Searchers”) or George C. Scott (in “Hardcore”) who went looking for lost children. And the invention of a beautiful female detective who needs to prove herself can only be called pure Hollywood, though the role is crisply written by Haggis and sternly fleshed out by the toughest of cookies, Charlize Theron, who adds intellectual clarity to the hard-rock confrontational work she did in “Monster” and “North Country.” With her hair returned to its natural brunette and pulled back from her face, her clothes a functional shirt-and-slacks combo from a chain outlet, Theron is armed—that is, unadorned—for battle. She takes on the Army, which wants Mike’s death covered up, as well as her own department, which doesn’t give a damn about the crime. She’s in everybody’s face, but her rage, no matter how familiar from her other movies, comes as a relief: Hank has to stifle himself in order to keep going, and we can’t possibly be as emotionally restrained as he is. Working both alone and together, these two thorny, rather solitary people make a good team, but Haggis, positioning them at odd angles to each other, respects the distance between them; even when they warm up a bit, he doesn’t pull on our heartstrings. In the movie’s austere scheme, they are the only heroes we’re going to get.
“In the Valley of Elah” moves steadily and strongly forward on two tracks. Part of the movie is a complex and suspenseful police procedural, culminating in a set of unnerving interrogations. The picture is also a technological and metaphysical lunge at the truth. When Hank first arrives at the base, he heists his son’s camera phone and turns it over to a hacker, who, day by day, pieces together the war scenes that Mike recorded. (The data has been fried by heat.) The hacker sends the material, in fragments, to Hank, and, as he sorts through the mesmerizing rubble—partial scenes of terror, exhilaration, torture, and death—we’re reminded of classic sequences from Antonioni’s “Blow-Up,” Coppola’s “The Conversation,” and De Palma’s “Blow Out,” in which the evidence of a crime lies buried in visual or aural hash. But this time, as the digital clumps break up and reform, the truth tauntingly escapes our grasp. We watch furious little scenes of Mike and members of his unit screaming at each other, and all sorts of hints and implications flash by, but we can’t quite put together what we’ve seen with Mike’s death at home. In the end, Haggis has made a miniature version of the war’s confusion, in which the actuality of what’s going on eludes full understanding. Mike’s videos are the only “movie” we see of Iraq, and, for all their hallucinatory power, they’re emblematic of the war’s failure.
Of this much we’re sure: the boys in Mike’s unit have nearly gone feral. The heat, the prolonged enclosure in combat vehicles, the fear that if they stop to avoid hitting someone in the road they might become a target—all of this has perverted natural goodness and turned it into something else. Hank Deerfield worked for years as a military policeman, and he’s no innocent. But these boys are more callous than what he knows. All through the investigation, as he enters the fast-food joints and the raucous topless bars near the base, he’s like an abashed visitor from another country, and when he watches the war scenes his son’s behavior cuts into his soul. He saw Americans screwing up in Vietnam (we assume), but he taught his boy better. The movie’s emotional center is the bond between warriors from two generations, and that bond comes close to breaking. The title, I think, is partly ironic. David fought Goliath in the Valley of Elah. Hank sees himself as a latter-day David, slaying monsters, and this is a view that he has clearly passed on to his son, but the movie suggests something else—that Hank’s notion of military uprightness has vanished, and America, including Mike, has become monstrous. Yet if the boy seems like an alien, Haggis offers a partial reconciliation at the end—a photograph taken by Mike that tells Hank, in effect, what he gave his son and what his son has given back to him. That is as far as Haggis will go in providing a resolution. The mood of the movie is wounded and ambiguous—it’s the very opposite of a tearjerker.
I loved the heated, overflowing talk in “Crash,” most of which is wonderfully written, and I wasn’t bothered by the movie’s pileup of coincidences: “Crash” was a Los Angeles fable about twisted-metal automotive connection in a disconnected place—coincidence was not a mere device but what the movie was about. In “Elah,” however, Haggis goes in a new direction. No one could mistake the movie for a documentary, but the picture has some of the rectitude of a good documentary—a tone of plainness without flatness. The color produced by the cinematographer, Roger Deakins, is slightly desaturated—a tinge of ghostliness hangs over the scenes—and the dialogue is sparse; much of the time, we piece together what’s going on from silences, insinuations, and lies. Except for Theron’s glaring tirades, Haggis keeps the rhetorical level tamped way down. There isn’t, for instance, a single political speech, a single cry of betrayal. The judgment of the war is in Tommy Lee Jones’s eyes, and in what Hank Deerfield does to express his disgust.
Jones’s father was a Texas oil rigger, his mother a policewoman and beauty-shop owner; he became a scholarship boy at a Texas prep school and a cum-laude graduate of Harvard. He never took an acting class, and he’s known to be short-tempered with other actors on the set. His clipped delivery could be taken for contempt (for acting, for commonplace sincerity), and maybe it is, but this movie about the harrowing of a proud soldier shows no trace of arrogance. “In the Valley of Elah” is a rarity: an American film that convinces you that its protagonist is genuinely a great man. ♦
