Elah Be Praised

The title of Paul Haggis’ new film In the Valley of Elah refers to the battleground that Goliath once terrorized before he was felled by David’s slingshot. It’s not exactly clear what the tale of David and Goliath means in the context of the film, though. When Tommy Lee Jones tells it as a bedtime story to the young son of single mom Charlize Theron, it seems to be a parable for facing your fear: you can’t defeat a monster, Jones says, unless you meet it in the open and look it in the eye. But since the film takes place against the backdrop of the war in Iraq, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that Haggis is making a larger political point—that perhaps in this conflict, the U.S. is the arrogant seemingly undefeatable Goliath, brought low when they should have scored an easy victory.

I don’t get how the two metaphors are supposed to fit together—which may be the first time a Paul Haggis movie didn’t make it crushingly obvious what it wants you to think at every given moment. Elah has not been made with what you’d call a light touch—Mark Isham’s dirgelike score and Roger Deakins’ deliberately washed-out cinematography are always there to remind you of the film’s seriousness of purpose—but for the most part, Haggis simply lets his story, and the effortless gravitas of Jones’ creased face, speak for itself.

The film, smartly, is structured not as a polemic on the war, but as a murder mystery. Jones is Hank Deerfield, a retired military policeman investigating the death of his son Mike, whose dismembered body was found in the New Mexico desert a few days after returning from Iraq. Doggedly following leads, noticing clues and connections that the local cops are too lazy to follow up on, Deerfield eventually must face the uncomfortable truth that Mike came back from combat a different person—that Iraq changed him (and by extension the United States) into a monster.

Haggis’ script is plotted fairly conventionally, complete with a red herring suspect who pops up at the end of the second act and handy witnesses who come forward with helpful information at exactly the moment Deerfield reaches a dead end. (The subplot about Mike’s heat-damaged PDA is a particularly obvious contrivance—the overworked techie Deerfield hires to repair it can only e-mail him the decorrupted video files one by one, and of course each new piece of the jigsaw puzzle falls in place just when Haggis needs it to.)

But I have to admit that Haggis handles these scenes very skillfully—the details of the case are imaginative yet realistic, the texture of life in this small southwestern army town is convincingly evoked, the internal logic of the mystery holds up, and Jones gives a compelling central performance as a man whose military stoicism is his greatest strength, as well as his greatest flaw. Jones is never less than watchable in this movie, even when he’s doing nothing more than making his bed or using the edge of a table to put a crease in his pants or just having his morning shave.

Of course, Haggis then has to go and show Jones cutting himself—and then having his blood drop onto the official letter notifying him of his son’s death. There’s also a recurring image of an upside-down American flag that I didn’t buy for a second. But I suppose Haggis felt he had to throw in at least a couple of those hammer-to-the-head touches. After all, what director wants to disappoint their fans?