In the Valley of Elah

Posted by Nathan Deen (nathan@filmschoolrejects.com) on September 30, 2007

David Cronenberg made a vast improvement from his overrated A History of Violence with Eastern Promises. Paul Haggis, on the other hand, has made only a marginal improvement from his ridiculously overrated Oscar Winning Crash with In the Valley of Elah. In the Valley of Elah is essentially a political and condensed version of Crash and while it works well sometimes and there is nothing overall that’s bad about the movie, Haggis still doesn’t seem to be covering all the bases.

Tommy Lee Jones plays Hank Deerfield, a Tennessean name if there ever was one. Hank is a Vietnam vet and a former military police officer. His wife Joan (Susan Sarandon) is mother of two boys, one of them, David, KIA ten years ago. The other son, Mike, just got back from Iraq and is stationed at a base in New Mexico. Mike has disappeared and hasn’t been heard from in two days. Hank drives down to the base to look for his son.

In search of answers he turns to the local police department, where he meets Det. Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron). The first scene between the two is somewhat spastic as they barely say two lines to each other and then Jones blurts out something like “My son has spent the last eighteen months in Iraq defending his country and he deserves better than this.” A body, chopped up and burned, is found on the outskirts of the military base and it turns out to be Mike. Hank and Emily start an investigation to track down the killers.

Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron are great actors and their performances certainly make their characters better than Haggis’s script does, but they don’t completely cover up the fact that their characters could be better written. For example, when Hank first finds out about his son’s death, no tears fall from his eyes and he holds them back the whole way through the movie. Instead of calling his wife, the first thing he wants to do is start his own investigation about what went down. Jones is terrific and sincere as well is Theron. They are certainly not to blame and Haggis should be groveling at their feet.

While Jones and Theron try to keep the film above mediocrity, the supporting characters are terrible. The film contains a particularly weird and mentally sick character named Penning, Mike’s roommate, but it’s almost like Haggis doesn’t ever realize he’s sick. Penning almost makes you wonder what kind of people the government is allowing into the military. There’s also a weak scene with Emily’s co-workers in which a woman is telling Emily about how her husband drowned her dog and for some reason her co-workers find this funny and start making barking sounds. Then there’s another one in which she is assigned to a case about a slaughter house worker who tortures chickens and her co-workers mock her with clucking sounds. It’s one thing to say the world is messed up but it’s another to just add randomly messed up characters to make your case. Plus, how many messed up people like that can there be in a small town in New Mexico?

Haggis leaves you hanging with a mixed message with a shot of a U.S. flag waving upside down at a school. It was an accident by a Salvadoran groundskeeper. Hank stops to let the groundskeeper know how it’s done and says that an upside down flag is a signal that the U.S. is in panic mode and we can’t fend for ourselves anymore. Toward the end of the movie, it seems like to this point Haggis has been trying to say the war is screwed up and ends the film with Hank going back and putting the flag upside down again. According to Hank, that’s not saying the world is screwed up, it’s saying that we can’t fend for ourselves anymore. Because of Haggis’s incompetence, this shot also presents itself as a cheap way for him trying to earn bonus points. It is also a mystery as to what the film’s title has to do with the film itself. Elah was the valley where David defeated Goliath but are there any David and Goliath comparisons to be found here? Is Haggis comparing it to the war? If so are we David and is our goal ridding the world of tyranny and terrorism Goliath? Many questions but very few answers.

In the Valley of Elah is an Oscar bait misfire. The performances by Jones and Theron certainly deserve recognition but make the film look better than it really is. A big problem is that there’s no one to help them out as the supporting characters are watered down and downright strange. James Franco (Spider-man) is in the movie but only in the beginning and we don’t get to really know him at all. If he was involved in Mike’s death then perhaps the film would have gone in a better direction. As it stands though, the movie’s conclusion is poorly executed and doesn’t provide enough payoff with everything the film had going for it up to that point.

The strength of In the Valley of Elah is a character that’s already dead: Mike. Hank is not only learning about who killed his son, but learning about his son himself. Mike wasn’t Mr. Perfect Son. A tragic event turned him into someone else. He was becoming a drug addict and was also starting to lose his mind. This should have been Haggis’s primary focus and message: how war affects the soldiers who are in it. Unfortunately, he lets all of these other things get in the way. It’s pretty clear that whatever message Haggis is trying to send to the audience, he’s having a tough time conveying it.

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