You can tell how important a film is by the amount of make-up its lead actress is wearing. If Charlize Theron’s au natural face foundation is anything to go by, In The Valley of Elah must be Very Serious Stuff Indeed.
And so it is. Unspooling with none of the stylistic idiosyncrasies of Paul Haggis’ feature debut, Crash (and, mercifully, none of its faux-liberal clichés), In The Valley of Elah is a perfectly crafted moral mystery that combines forensic intelligence with emotional subtlety. The question at stake here is not ‘Whodunit?’, but ‘Who’s responsible?’
Tommy Lee Jones is Hank Deerfield, a retired Marine investigator whose son, Mike, has followed in his old man’s footsteps only to go missing on his return from Iraq. Damaged mobile phone footage suggests that the young soldier suffered some kind of trauma, but when the military prove unable to answer his questions, Hank is forced to make the long journey to Mike’s barracks to find out just what the hell is going on. He hooks up with Detective Sanders (Theron) after a grizzly murder sparks his suspicions, and the two of them set about picking their way through a political minefield to get to The Truth. Assuming, that is, they can handle the truth.
This is powerful stuff from Haggis, light years away from the likes of Robert Redford’s liberal guilt trip Lions for Lambs. In Whiteville, Tennessee, he’s discovered an America every bit as foreign to our eyes as the streets of Baghdad. Away from the cosmopolitan centres of New York and LA, this is a country of soul-numbing, strip-lit architecture where the grey uniformity of the buildings is mirrored in the politically sedated partisanship of the people. Everything is suffused in sulphurous greens and greys, as if the noxious hypocrisy of the administration that feeds on towns like this has somehow seeped back into the atmosphere, poisoning everything it touches.
In the middle of it all is Tommy Lee Jones with That Face, unmistakeable with its creaks and crags and those sloping, vertiginous lines that pull his eyes down into a state of perpetual sorrow. It’s easy to just point the camera at an actor like this and leave him to it, but Haggis has pushed and prodded until Jones offers him something real. This is a man whose eyes are pried open, almost against his will, until he’s stripped of illusions and is forced to gaze on the real state of America.
This is compelling and even subversive filmmaking at its finest, combining the slick entertainment values of a Hollywood big shot with a perceptive and confrontational agenda. There’s no tub-thumping or blind ideology, just sharp writing and precision performances. And even if the film doesn’t go quite far enough in daring to criticise the individual US fighting man (still a taboo in American cinema), its final shot still packs a whopper of an emotional punch. Consider us floored.
