'In the valley of Elah'

Rating:

BY JAN STUART | jan.stuart@newsday.com

September 14, 2007

With some actors, characters emerge through the eyes or the walk. With Tommy Lee Jones, they seem to flow from the lines in his face.

In Paul Haggis' "In the Valley of Elah," Jones' face is a poignantly detailed map of skepticism, simmering rage and, in the final count, self-recrimination. His Hank Deerfield, a Tennessee gravel dealer with the resilience and investigative acumen of a Mickey Spillane gumshoe, is not one to suffer fools easily. He's also a little too aware of everything and everyone around him to be in touch with the fool in himself. In other words, he's deeply fallible.

Deerfield's fallibility and humanity rise oh-so-slowly to the surface over the course of a meticulously crafted tale, one that deploys the alluring conventions of detective thrillers to deliver some very unpleasant (if unsurprising) news about the dehumanizing effects of war.

Not long after Deerfield's eldest son, Mike, is reported AWOL a week after returning from Iraq, his body shows up near his base in gruesomely burned parts. The scattered locations of the limbs turn the case into a jurisdictional hot potato that neither the local police nor the military police are particularly eager to touch. Deerfield takes the matter into his own hands, summoning his dormant expertise in both criminal pathology and military machinery from his days as an Army MP.

Aiding Deerfield in his search for the truth are war videos downloaded from Mike's cell phone and a police detective named Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron), whose initial reluctance to get involved dissolves as clues solidify. As the two begin to connect, the buried subtext of their daily lives surfaces: Deerfield harbors residues of anguish over another son lost years back in a military operation, while Sanders must juggle the pressures of single motherhood and galling displays of sexism on the job.

Haggis' title is a reference to the story of David and Goliath, a biblical allegory of triumph over impossible odds that gets turned on its head as the Iraq videos taken by Deerfield's son implicate the young American soldiers in acts of torture. As war turns well-meaning youths into unfeeling machines, who is David, and who is Goliath?

As he demonstrated in his restless screenplays for "Crash" and Clint Eastwood's two Iwo Jima epics, Haggis is a regular circus artist at keeping multiple narrative balls in the air. In this instance, he juggles a few more than his mission can bear, conflating mayhem in Iraq with all sorts of scurrilous official behavior in America. Where there's smoke at home, he is saying, there will be fire abroad. But we're too busy sorting out the "jurisdictional mess" his combative characters are making to connect all the dots.

Haggis bleaches out the colors from his film stock to maintain a sober, noirish atmosphere. It's a bit top-heavy withdetective-thriller standbys: trampy barmaids with hearts of gold and baby-faced innocents with inner piranhas waiting to spring. Susan Sarandon ends up getting lost in the shuffle as Deerfield's shell-shocked wife. But it's majestically compelling: pensive and fraught with concern as the creases on Jones' forehead.

IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH (R). "Crash" writer-director Paul Haggis brings his puppetmaster narrative skill to bear on this somber mystery-thriller with Iraq war reverberations. Tommy Lee Jones breathes quiet fire as a military vet investigating his soldier son's disappearance, and Charlize Theron is solid as a police detective who can't get any respect. If anything, the script is too worked through for its own good, but you won't be bored. 1:53 (violent and disturbing content, language and some sexuality/ nudity). At Regal Union Square, AMC Loews Lincoln Square, Manhattan.