Review of In the Valley of Elah (2007) by Matthew F — 19 Feb 2011

Interestingly, Paul Haggis has emerged as one of the most divisive contemporary filmmakers today. While many uppercrust elites find his in-your-face political awareness simplistic and self-indulgent, many others find his writing particularly salient in post-9/11 America, and his direction emits an eeire darkness underlying the malevolent mystery in virtually every character. Whle I have stated [i]Crash[/i] to be the best film of 2005, I have heard many good arguments to the contrary. And I think that's great. Controversy is sometimes what defines the greatest movies and moviemakers across the generations. And I still believe that twenty or thirty years from now, people will still remember [i]Crash[/i] and still be debating about it.

As for [i]Elah[/i], while it won't be the firestarter [i]Crash[/i] was, I believe it's still worthy of consideration at this year's Oscars, particularly in the category of Best Actor in Tommy Lee Jones. While Haggis has relied on superb casts in the past, he has rarely elicited the kind of reserved and nuanced stoicism we see in Jones' character...a man whose faith and trust in the American military is slowly degraded, as is his innocent view of the servicemen themselves. When the film begins, Haggis introduces us to the world of Jones' character, an apple pie universe where every house on the block is adorned with an American flag, and where you never leave a bedroom without making the bed, military style. You can practically feel the seething animosity towards a foreign custodial worker who aciidentally raises the flag upside-down on a school flagpole. As the film progresses, however, we see a different view of the American military and the war effort than one might presuppose a man such as Jones might have. As he trails his sons wherabouts the night of his murder, we encounter along with him a seedy world of stripclubs, drugs and casual wartime attrocities. In a sense, we can easily compare Jones' character's journey to that of our own. After 9/11, there was a collective sense of patriotic naivete...over time degrading into a dispassionate sense of anger and betrayal by the behavior of our leaders, whose faulty bravado have influenced the actions of an entire generation of military men, and cost the lives of thousands. The film is shot with a drab color palette, almost as if the entire movie was lit with fluorescant lights, adding an ugly sense of reality to the proceedings. [i]In the Valley of Elah[/i] is most certainly an anti-war film, with a compelling dose of murder mystery mixed in, and well worth the entry fee to see.