As the credits for “In the Valley of Elah” began to roll, I exited the theater with one thought on my mind: “How am I supposed to write a review about a movie I’m completely indifferent towards?” The plot was kind of interesting, but mostly slow. The acting was okay, nothing special. It was partially about Iraq, and yet I wasn’t completely shaken up. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The more I thought, the more it opened up into a real gem of a film.
Several days after returning from a tour in Iraq, Mike Deerfield goes AWOL. His father Hank
(Tommy Lee Jones), a retired Army career officer, drives to his son’s base to investigate.
While looking at Mike’s quarters, Hank steals his son’s cell phone. Although it had been severely damaged from the Iraqi heat, he pays to have the few videos clips from his tour recovered.
Meanwhile, Detective Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron) and her team find Mike’s body on the border of the city and Fort Rudd base. He was brutally murdered, dismembered, burned and left in a field for the animals to displace. The remainder of the film is a slow and almost disengaging who-done-it with Hank as deeply involved in solving his son’s murder as both Det. Sanders and military policeman Lt. Kirklander (Jason Patric).
Theron is great at making herself ugly, but in this film, she’s not so much ugly as she is plain. Her character was a wonderful breath of fresh air. Det. Sanders is a strong, smart woman with not a hint of sexual tension directed at anyone. What a revelation! Honestly, has this ever happened in a movie before?
Maybe the reason I wasn’t initially blown away with the acting was because it didn’t feel like they were acting. It felt like someone was following ordinary people in an intense and hostile environment around with a camera and catching their deeply honest reactions. There were no larger-than-life characters, no star-crossed lovers. It was so much more reality than television. As movie-goers, we’ve been conditioned to suspend our disbelief and when a film breaks the mold, we see it as flat and dry.
Some may see “Valley” as yet another anti-war film determined to defile the military’s efforts in Iraq. I didn’t see it that way at all. In fact, I found it to be completely apolitical, if that’s even possible.
The clips from Mike’s cell phone reveal a deeply troubled man coping with the chaos of war in ways that could be construed as liberal Hollywood making soldiers look like baby killers. On the other hand, it could also be read as an attempt at victimization, which could be equally annoying to the yellow-ribbon-toting soccer moms among us. However, I feel like it’s more of a commentary on the psychological toll war takes, not simply an effort to dehumanize the soldiers or make excuses for them.
“Valley” is a fictionalized account of a true story. Writer and director Paul Haggis (“Crash,” “Million Dollar Baby”) was inspired by a report in Playboy about Iraq War veteran Richard Davis’ murder. The fact that this really happened is another reason why I don’t think this film is propaganda.
