DVD : In The Valley Of Elah [2008]

Rating: - Excellent. Bleak, but excellent
So first off, ignore the cover. Tommy Lee Jones with the torch and Charlize Theron with her gun drawn underneath the words AN INTENSE THRILLER rather implies a lot of chases, gunplay and other shenanigans. Without giving anything away, there is one chase. Charlize Theron does have a gun and TLJ a torch (although I'm not sure if he ever turns it on). But I'm already getting distracted.

As you can see from the other reviews, TLJ plays a retired solider, who is told that his son has gone missing, shortly after returning from Iraq. He then spends the rest of the film single mindedly battling to find out what happened to him, with no help from the Army. After initial reluctance, he is helped by Charlize Theron and they piece together what happened.

But that's rather incidental. The film is quiet and sober, but also angry about Iraq. About what we are doing to it, but even more so about what it is doing to our young men. And, in turn, to the rest of us. It's about a father who has already lost one son and can't bear the prospect of losing another.

The cast are uniformly excellent, and this is well worth a watch. It is very bleak, be warned, but highly recommended.

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Rating: - A pleasant surprise
The 2007 film written and directed by Paul Haggis, starring Tommy Lee Jones, Charlize Theron, and Susan Sarandon was an unexpected treat to good acting, tension and resoultion. How good films should be made! Tommy Lee Jones is superb and every wrinkle of his faces betrays volumes of emotions that want to shout out over the needless loss of a son.

In The Valley of Elah is based on actual events. The plot explores themes of the Iraq war, abuse of prisoners and PTSD following active combat.

The film portrays a father's hunt for his son's killers. Here is where the Biblical allusion starts. The Valley of Elah was the location of the battle between David and Goliath in the war between the Philistines and Israelis - a clue to the real subject of the film. IT reinforces an important lesson in a society which is largely demilitarised: war changes people, and can often deform or reform them. What carries the film's tension is the confrontational atmosphere.

The ending is though is a let-down - suddenly a solution through a confession is presented. What lacks is that we never get inside the heads of those who commit the murder. It would be important to understand the way that the soldiers are changed by their experiences. Not enough is shown of what propels people into the army. We never understand these young men's earlier lives - hence we don't know to what extent what they become now has already been innate.

One of the film's aims is to bring America itself to its own valley of Elah - its own confrontation with what it has done to its young men.

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Rating: - a sledgehammer message
It has to be said that in recent years Tommy Lee Jones has wracked up some superb roles, both supporting and lead, and in his old age is maturing rather like a fine wine (if you want proof of this, watch his roles in Three Burials of Melquiados Estrada, and his great supporting turn in No Country for Old Men). It is good to see this string of quietly played, meaty roles continuing with In the Valley of Elah (the titles by the way refers to the valley were David fought Goliath, an apt and not very subtle metaphor for this film).
Jones plays Hank Deerfield, a lifelong soldier and retired Military Policeman, who receives the news that his son is missing. However, like his father and his older (and now deceased) brother, Deerfield junior is a soldier, recently returned from duty in Iraq, and the military are not that keen to help Hank in his quest to find his son. The discovery of a burnt and mutilated corpse leads things down a darker path, and it is only through the help of a local police officer (Charlize Theron, in her meatiest and most understated role since Monster) that Hank begins to discover the truth.
Any film dealing with the emotional fallout of the war in Iraq and the effect that this situation has on a country's young fighting men was always going to be a difficult sell, and unfortunately, director Paul Haggis (previously best known for his multi-Oscar winner Crash) is not the subtlest of directors, rather slamming the point home that war is hell but coming home can sometimes be worse, rather than allowing the viewer to reach this conclusion on their own (now you see the obviousness of the David and Goliath metaphor). This is not a bad film by any means, with Jones giving another (Oscar nominated) performance, and featuring some superb support from Theron, as well as Jason Patric as a military investigator trying to ensure that the military come out of this looking if not good then not bad either, and a great but rather small role for Susan Sarandon as Hanks wife. The film also has some rather good points to say about being a parent and the nature of grief amidst all the talk of war, but unfortunately the sledgehammer message rather obliterates these more subtle points. A very good attempt to explain not what war is, but rather what it can do to people, turning the healthy into casualties just as surely as the wounded and the dead, but not the unqualified success it should have been.

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Rating: - Just average - I expected more
I have just watched this movie. I had been waiting eagerly for a few months for the release of the DVD and I have to say I was a bit disappointed. I thought the acting from all the leads was excellent but the story was deprressing - obviously the subject matter wasn't going to be one of laughs but even so, I thought it may have been a bit more uplifting. Very slow and quite boring up to half way through. At least I rented the DVD and didn't pay full price at the cinema. Shame - could have been better in my opinion.

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Rating: - Grim and morose film
"In the Valley of Elah" is an elegaic, brooding film which verges on the depressing at times.It tells the story of an ex soldier's quest to discover what has happened to his son following his disappearance whilst on leave from the war in Iraq.Tommy Lee Jones plays this worried father, an ex soldier himself and he acts the role well , ably supported by Charlize Theron ,a police detective who helps him.The film is slow moving and far from action packed and I found it to be only moderately entertaining. I failed to derive any great message from this film other than that some American soldiers behaved like scumbags in Iraq and subsequently suffered from PTSD. There is no examination of whether the USA should actually be even participating in this controversial conflict and as a result the final melodramatic scene in the film seemed a little incongruous to me.