What I Watched -- In the Valley of Elah

Whoa, is there ever a lot going on in this movie. It starts out with a phone call to a father, who learns that his son Mike has gone AWOL days after his unit's return from Iraq. The former military man sets out to find Mike, and succeeds - certainly not in the way he hoped, but perhaps in a way that wasn't too surprising.

Tommy Lee Jones is fantastic as Hank Deerfield. He plays his role with conviction, sincerity, and purpose, but not in such a way as to make the whole thing seem too hokey or emotional. Charlize Theron plays Detective Emily Sanders; she gets involved in the case after a jurisdictional dispute with the military police on the local base. Unlike Jones, she unfortunately didn't get any award nods for her performance, which I thoroughly enjoyed. She plays a straight cop who has some history, though you never quite get the full story; she's sick of taking crap from the men in her unit and she wants a chance to do some real work and to do it right. Susan Sarandon plays Hank's wife; she plays the part with appropriate parts restraint and anguish, although she is only in a few scenes.

This movie, as I said, covers a lot of territory: the relationships between parents and children, and between husbands and wives; military secrecy; reactions to guilt; police politics; gender roles; responsibility for ourselves and each other; military/civilian conflict. By virtue of its limited time scale, some of these topics are only alluded to, but for some reason that doesn't make them feel unexplored. One of the beauties of the acting in this film is that it isn't overdone; the characters are just people, doing whatever it is they do, for whatever reason. Sometimes you find out their reasons, sometimes not. But because they're just plodding forward, the issues they face or brush past feel totally natural, like they belong there. It doesn't seem like any conflict or comment was stuck into the screenplay just to make a point.

Perhaps even more brilliantly, it doesn't feel political. If you'll remember back to my post about Green Zone, and how irritating I find that, you'll also know why I appreciate the lack of it so much in this movie. It easily could have become an Iraq-is-destroying-our-boys-with-PTSD movie, but it didn't quite get there. Almost, but not quite. Somehow. There are a few shots of Mike's unit in Iraq, and one or two guys spill the beans about what happened there, but luckily nothing is terribly Iraq-specific. Their stories are more about men just trying to stay alive in a tough situation, and the unfortunate consequence that sometimes has.

In the Valley of Elah starts out feeling patriotic, but that fades a bit when the truth starts to come out. It all comes to a close when Hank asks for help in the final scene. What is delightfully unclear from the way he asks is who needs the help. Maybe everybody.

Bottom line: totally worth it to see. And you get a little history lesson about King David to boot, if you're interested. As a bonus, James Franco (whom I love right now because it seems like there is nothing he can't do) plays Mike's unit CO.