Battle Scars

In solving the mystery of his son's death, a Vietnam veteran gets reacquainted with the horrors of war.

by Cindy Fuchs

THE MOURNING AFTER: Tommy Lee Jones and Susan Sarandon work through the grieving process. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

At base, In the Valley of Elah — Paul Haggis' follow-up to the dreadfully over-lauded Crash — is a detective story, laced through with a character study of Vietnam War vet and retired MP Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones). On learning that his son Mike (Jonathan Tucker) is AWOL from New Mexico's Fort Rudd, he hops in his pickup truck and drives straight on through, determined to get to the bottom of such abnormal behavior. That he leaves behind his wife, Joan (Susan Sarandon), looking bereft is indicative of Hank's rigid worldview. Whether because of or despite his experience in Southeast Asia, Hank holds hard to his faith in order. And so he will solve the mystery — first Mike's disappearance, and then his murder.

The mystery goes deeper, of course, into the Deerfields' difficult family history (Joan laments that she has now lost two sons to what she sees as her husband's military legacy) but also into Hank's psyche, as he contemplates what it means to him to be a man, a patriot and a father. (The husband part of it doesn't get much attention here.) Like many a movie hero before him, he determines that if he can only set right what seems askew, he will have done his duty and reset his little piece of the universe.

The solving process is complicated and made moving by Jones' singular intensity; a close-up of his deeply creased face does more emotional work than pages of dialogue. His investigation is obstructed or aided by the New Mexico cops, MP Lt. Kirklander (Jason Patric), who wants to cover something bad, and municipal detective Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron), a single mom who's harassed by her fellow dicks precisely because she is a girl. Where Hank believes in the loyalty of masculine, combat-forged units, she sees fracture, competition and cruelty.

Still, she doesn't quite see the racism that undergirds Hank's sense of unity, and the movie mostly glosses over it. Hank studies scrambled bits of Mike's cell phone footage — images of abuse and prejudice against Iraqi locals — but doesn't connect this to his own assumptions about Pvt. Ortiez (Victor Wolf), the "chico" in his son's unit he suspects of malfeasance. Still, he appreciates a young tech played by Rick Gonzalez who cleans up the cell phone footage, so it may be that Hank doesn't know his own depths.

Or perhaps, as the film suggests, he doesn't understand how he's been shaped by military culture. Hank does come to see himself apart from the new generation — adrift in and out of Iraq, poorly trained, guided and cared for upon their return. When Ortiez confesses that even though he wanted to come home every day in the war, now he wants only to go back, the camera frames them as mirror images: Hank is less different than he thinks. It's a stark, smart moment, but it's also rare in this film.

(c_fuchs@citypaper.net)

In the Valley of Elah | Directed by Paul Haggis | A Warner Independent Pictures release