In the Valley of Elah Reviews

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Post by Hustler »

I liked it partially. First of all, given the fact that it´s based on a true story, the whole film seems so conventional that its structure is similar to a telefilm. Tommy Lee Jones is consistent, but this single circumstance is not enough to enrich a film full of obvious symbolisms.
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Post by Big Magilla »

To my surprise, I liked it. While no more relevant to the world view than an episode of NCIS, it is based on a true story so giving some latitude to the slow uncovering of the truth would not be inapprorpriate.

The greatest strength is Tommy Lee Jones' performance. As a father who goes in search of his missing son and finds more than he bargained for, Jones has never been better. It is easily one of the year's best performances. Why he wasn't up for more awards than he was can only be attributed to not enough people having seen the film.

The screenplay, though nothing special, does at least make sense. Sure, there are a few fill-in tangents such as Charlize Theron's growing acceptance by her redneck fellow cops and the relationship between Theron and her son, but mostly it sticks to the investigation at hand. Roger Deakins' unshowy cinematography is just as strong here as it is in the Oscar nominated No Country for Old Men and The Assassinatioin of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

The film doesn't really make a political statement outside of the usual "war is hell" theme until the final shot - though telegraphed early on and aniticpated the moment Jones opens the package mailed to him by his son, it is the perfect image to end the film on.
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Post by Sabin »

This movie is actually pretty bad. I've been more lenient with Paul Haggis' shortcomings as a writer and director than perhaps I should have. 'Crash' is not a very good movie, but I enjoyed individual moments enough to recommend it at the time; however, were I to watch it again, I might dislike it far, far more. I'm sure there's ample room in my temples for a bullet to drive through were I to ever consider sitting through this film again. Only Paul Haggis could look at the war in Iraq and try to emulate a fucking Rob Reiner movie...and somehow fail. For all 'A Few Good Men''s shortcomings, at heart it was inoffensive. There is a prestige packaging in place with 'In the Valley of Elah' that I find fairly putrid, right down to the Oscar-bait song at the end. Don't let the flash fool you: this film is completely uninterested in the mindset of our brave men and women in combat, how they change and become something else.

This film started out fairly strongly for what I actually thought was a decent spell of time. I was incredibly engrossed and assumed that I had made it through the first act with admiration...IT WAS ONLY TEN MINUTES! From there on out, my admiration fell to short supply. Tommy Lee Jones may very well end up with this year's Oscar. He is the perfect Haggis actor, underselling dick swagger and sledgehammer with the appearance of honesty. What else could a director with the limited worldview of scientology AND impotent conservatism hope for?

This film is a complete mess, no idea what it wants to be at any given moment. Tommy Lee Jones anchors what is essentially a lackadaisical procedural, actually undermining it by threatening to take it to more interesting territory. Cast Kevin Costner, and you know a turkey by the smell...cast Tommy Lee Jones, and some people are going to be fooled. A man and wife lose their second son to war combat, want to know THE WHOLE STORY. Enter Charlize Theron to help, and what a bimbo does she come off as! We've got a slew of Iraq films on the horizon but I doubt I'll see a less convincing actor serving in any capacity. If Jennifer Garner doesn't look like a convincing soldier, Charlize Theron isn't convincing sitting at a desk. She'll probably get a nomination.

There are some impacting moments from Jones and some real life soldiers, but by in large, I found this film totally unengaging aside from the roadstops along the way. The film works the best during pause and mull, with Tommy Lee Jones doing amateur detective work (that I will say the actor makes seem fairly plausible) and encountering well-cast actors along the way. He is constantly undercut by bullshit nobody should care about. When the film (in typical Haggis-ian fashion) adds a flavor of forced racism to Jones' character, you just know it's only to ultimately serve a redemptive factor near the end. Paper thin characterizations, and we are told again and again that there are two sides to every story...the most elemental of kindergarten lessons.

This is what a Paul Haggis film looks like when there's little to jump to. He's been working towards this for years...'Million Dollar Baby' (A-story: Eastwood to A-story: Swank, and sometimes to B-story: Freeman)...'Crash' (B to B to B to B)...'Flags' (INCOHERENT FLASHBACK ALERT!)...'In the Valley of Elah' would be better served if the lesson from Jones' beside chat with Theron's son was taken to heart. This is an A-story movie (Jones vs. system; simple, clear-cut) with needless B-story sledgehammer.

I've been debating whether or not to even suggest if this movie means well; in truth, I'm not sure it does. The Iraq War is perfect fodder for Haggis, because in truth it's just as manipulative a setting as racist Los Angeles. The Red Staters must be put through the wringer to come out the other end with pride in our country yet grief for our men and women. RED + BLUE = PURPLE, right? NO!!! This nation is not Purple it is Red and Blue. A Purple America is just as unpleasant as a Red America. Purple America looks just like 'In the Valley of Elah'...simplistic, palatable, politically inoffensive, socially irresponsible, and Cindy Sheehan is still a bitch. I don't think this film if of honorable intent at all, it just very well could have been and that's not enough to redeem it.
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Post by OscarGuy »

The reviewer doesn't trash the film, but doesn't single it out for much more than pedestrian praise.

In the Valley of Elah
By ROBERT KOEHLER
Charlize Theron helps Tommy Lee Jones investigate the death of his son, an Iraq war vet, in writer-director Paul Haggis' 'In the Valley of Elah.'

A Warner Independent Pictures release presented in association with Nala Films, Summit Entertainment, Samuels Media, of a Blackfriar's Bridge production. Produced by Patrick Wachsberger, Steven Samuels, Darlene Caamano Loquet, Paul Haggis, Laurence Becsey. Executive producers, Stan Wlodkowski, David Garrett, Erik Feig, James Holt, Emilio Diez Barroso, Bob Hayward. Co-producers, Dana Maksimovich, Deborah Rennard. Directed, written by Paul Haggis; story, Mark Boal, Haggis.

Hank Deerfield - Tommy Lee Jones
Det. Emily Sanders - Charlize Theron
Lt. Kirklander - Jason Patric
Joan Deerfield - Susan Sarandon
Sgt. Dan Carnelli - James Franco
Arnold Bickman - Barry Corbin
Chief Buchwald - Josh Brolin
Evie - Frances Fisher
Cpl. Steve Penning - Wes Chatham
Spc. Gordon Bonner - Jake McLaughlin

The Iraq war has proven as nettlesome to Hollywood moviemakers as it has to Washington policymakers, and "In the Valley of Elah" continues the trend. Working overtime to be an important statement on domestic dissatisfaction with the war and the special price paid by vets and their families, Paul Haggis' follow-up to "Crash" is too self-serious to work as a straight-ahead whodunit and too lacking in imagination to realize its art-film aspirations. Lightning probably won't strike twice for Haggis, with prestigious fall festival premieres unlikely to translate into strong domestic cash flow for Warner Independent, though foreign returns could be brighter.
At its heart, "Elah's" storytelling (inspired from a true story first reported by Mark Boal in Playboy) is the stuff of a James Patterson thriller rather than a grandly elegiac reading of one father's tragedy. Unwilling to opt for the pulp-trash excesses of such military thrillers as "The General's Daughter," the film ends up delivering a poorly conceived message of alarm, bluntly signaling that the war is causing America's sons and daughters severe psychological damage.It also continues a line of recent movies addressing the first Gulf War ("Jarhead") and the current one ("Home of the Brave," "Grace Is Gone") that fail to capture the realities of war experience and familial angst beyond basic truisms and pictorial surfaces.A former Vietnam vet, retired Army sergeant and Tennessee truck-hauler, Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones) receives a call from Fort Rudd that his son Mike (Jonathan Tucker) is missing, though his unit is back from Iraq. Without having even a modest discussion with long-suffering wife Joan (Susan Sarandon), Hank drives to the New Mexico base to glean more information and hopefully reunite with his son. When Hank arrives, he finds that Mike's unit buddies are keeping mum and base officers like Lt. Kirklander (Jason Patric) and Sgt. Carnelli (James Franco) are little more than bureaucrat lackeys with little interest in the case.

Hank gradually earns the respect of one of the local civilian cops in neighboring Bradford, Det. Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron), informing her that Mike "has been bringing democracy to a shithole ... (and) deserves more than this." Not one for subtlety, Haggis ensures that Emily is not only the only woman in her department, forever marginalized by her male colleagues, but that she's also a single mom to a cute boy (Devin Brochu).

When a murder scene appears to be on the borderline between Army and local jurisdictions, the locals -- except increasingly suspicious Emily -- are willing to hand it over to the MPs for investigation.

The film awkwardly shifts between Hank's emotional realities -- as he watches some disturbing vid clips recovered from Mike's cell phone -- and a cycle of fairly obvious red herrings. One, involving Mike's unit buddy Robert (Victor Wolf), consumes an inordinate amount of running time, and is amounts to a one-dimensional portrayal of American-style bigotry.

While taciturn Hank, a man of so few words that he verges on being mean, cold and heartless, busts a few heads on his way to getting answers, Emily doggedly gets into extended verbal tussles with every authority figure in sight, from Kirklander to her immediate boss, police chief Buchwald (Josh Brolin).

Much of this is woefully familiar in dramatic terms, but viewers may find welcome distractions in cinematographer Roger Deakins' grandly panoramic widescreen visions of a contemporary American West -- emphasizingthe barrenness of the places people live and work -- as well as Jones' laser-focused performance, which is almost radical in its deliberately hardened flatness. As integral and crucial as each piece is to pic, both Deakins and Jones operate in worlds of their own, almost intimidating in their individual power and concentration. Theron gamely works hard to match Jones on screen, but her perf recalls the thankless roles so many of George C. Scott's many co-stars had to settle for. While vet thesps like Patric, Sarandon and Brolin come and go (even the superb Frances Fisher, as a topless barkeep, feels underused), rookie actor and Iraq vet Jake McLaughlin has a few exceptional scenes with Jones that impressively suggest a hidden world of hurt.

Most production departments, particularly Laurence Bennett's site-specific production design, are solid, though considerably less of Mark Isham's plodding and glum score would have been more; ditto some of the song choices (including a closer by Annie Lennox). Odd title, which will surely be a commercial impediment, alludes to the Israeli location of the biblical battle between David and Goliath.
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Post by Sabin »

'In the Valley of Elah'
*/****

After reaching rock-bottom with Crash, the only way left for Paul Haggis to go was up, and yet In the Valley of Elah feels like an act of slumming for a man who won two Oscars for putting on a histrionic impersonation of Robert Altman's laidback humanist style. A namby-pamby tirade against the war in Iraq, In the Valley of Elah is a Canadian's Sydney Pollack-inspired drag revue, with Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron in the Paul Newman and Sally Field roles from Absence of Malice. Jones stars as a war veteran whose son appears to have gone AWOL after returning from Iraq, and Theron is the police detective who helps him put together the pieces of an investigation compromised by chauvinist and bureaucratic military forces. These two don't sleep with each other, saving their energy instead for the systems that try to fuck each of them over, which ensures they come out on top, even if audiences don't.

Haggis treats Hank (Jones) as a dense lump of red-state clay, bombarding him with tragedy until he's moved the man to the right—which is to say, left—side of the political divide. Before learning that his son, Mike (Jonathan Tucker), is actually dead, hacked to pieces and dumped in a field that just falls within military jurisdiction, Hank gets a savvy Latino tech-head, Gabriel (Rick Gonzalez), to unscramble the images and videos Mike kept on a cell phone that was baked by the grueling Iraqi sun. Forget for a moment the unchecked Mike's uncanny obsession with taking pictures and recording video in the middle of a war and note the transparent means by which Haggis uses the techie's ostensibly time-consuming reparation of the cell phone's image and video files to drag out Hank's inevitable conversion to an anti-American ethos. Each new file arrives in Hank's inbox depicting an increasingly graphic act of torture committed against Iraqis by American soldiers, so by the time he discovers the truth about his son's death, it's a miracle he doesn't congratulate the perpetrators for putting Mike out of his moral misery.

A synthesis of A Few Good Men and Norma Rae, In the Valley of Elah plays out as a calculated attempt to appeal to jockboy political science majors and the Daughters of the American Revolution. If that sounds like a nightmare, it mostly is, but when Haggis casts his sights on Emily Sanders (Theron), the film becomes almost tolerable, even as it stirs up bad memories of Theron's self-righteous Joan of Arc routine from North Country. At least one of Theron's combative scenes with Jason Patrick comically suggests an act of foreplay, but the character's willingness to play dirty in order to assert her equanimity in the workforce is surprisingly nasty, and the laxness with which the police force defers responsibility for the investigation into Mike's death connects, almost subtly, to the way the military attempts to cover up its messes.

Like Crash, In the Valley of Elah is so obviously plotted it could have been scripted by the inflatable autopilot from Airplane! Haggis hawks fake seriousness, sees people as archetypes, distills real-life crisis to trite melodrama, inhumanely reduces racial strife to red herrings, and wastes the talents of actors like Susan Sarandon in bit parts that might have made more sense within the context of a Law and Order episode. But his success is not surprising: Because Haggis telegraphs all his punches, leaving absolutely nothing to the imagination, his films are easily appreciated as tidy screenwriting exercises, giving hope to aspiring filmmakers who chase after the same bogus Hollywood dream Altman put into alarming context with The Player.

Emily's negligence in one scene is responsible for a woman's death—recalling the journalistic insensitivity that factors into Melinda Dillon's suicide in Absence of Malice—but she's meant to be absolved because the misogyny of her peers understandably interferes with her better senses (she's David to their Goliaths). Hank, a war hawk and unconscious racist, isn't so easily forgiven, which is not to say he isn't redeemable. The problem here isn't so much the arrogance with which Haggis recognizes Hank as one of those under-30% holdovers who still support the George W. Bush administration, but the unexamined race-class nexus of the film's locale. Haggis, a calculated Hollywood player, thinks he's turning Hank's presumptions about race against him except the character's postulations aren't credible, and the examples Haggis gives to illustrate the man's racism only expose his own twisted notion of how races relate to one another.

While Hank is trying to solve Mike's murder, he scours the boy's war imagery for clues. In one video, which has Mike cruelly sticking his finger into the bloody arm wound of an Iraqi man, Hank catches a cholo scowling at the camera and, in a bizarre leap, fingers the young Mexican as his son's murderer. More inexplicable is an earlier scene during which Hank notices an American flag hanging upside down in front of a school. In the real world—which is to say, the one Haggis doesn't share with the rest of us—a person would construe this as a deliberate act of protest. In the filmmaker's artificial version of reality, the flag is upside down because the school's El Salvadorian janitor doesn't know better. The mind boggles trying to rationalize how this scenario could ever transpire outside a privileged screenwriter's computer screen (or one of Fred Armisen's "I'm just keeeeeeding" SNL sketches), but this wouldn't be the first time Haggis has crapped on common sense (and decency) in the name of cheap bathos. Still, nothing—not even multiple viewings of Crash—can prepare one for the ludicrous bookend this racist sequence receives. It's so predictable you'd think Haggis would have avoided visualizing it—but there it is, stinking up the screen and further confirming Haggis's warped sense of humanity.
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Post by kooyah »

dws1982 wrote: Can we quit using Haggis's TV career used to blackball his films (sight unseen, in some cases)?

Really. You'd think that having Crash on his resume would be bad enough.




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Post by Big Magilla »

I'm keeping an open mind on this one. I couldn't tell much from the trailer except that Tommy Lee Jones looked quite forceful in it. Yeah, it does have a son of Missing look to it, and I wasn't the world's biggest fan of Missing, but I did like Haggis' Million Dollar Baby script and some of his Crash script though I thought the film as a whole was wildly over-praised even its big Oscar push and surprise win.

Jones has been been aching for a best actor nod for some time now. He was being pushed for The Missing (a different film than the Jack Lemmon-Sissy Spacek Missing) and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. His third big try could be the charm. Charlize Theron looks good, Susan Sarandon wasted, but trailers can be deceptive.
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Post by dws1982 »

anonymous wrote:I hope it doesn't mean a fourth consecutive Oscar nod for the Walker, Texas Ranger co-creator.

Can we quit using Haggis's TV career used to blackball his films (sight unseen, in some cases)? Plus, Haggis himself was not involved with Walker beyond the first few episodes (which he did for hire, as he didn't think the show would go anywhere), which, for legal reasons, got him credited as a Creator of the show. Look at the movies on their own merits or demerits, please.
-------------------------------------------
Glenn Kenny from Premiere likes it, according to his blog:

Well. As someone who despised Crash so much that I was almost moved to a physical fight on the night it won all its Oscars (there were aggravating circumstances, I grant, but still—I'm not a physical-fight sort of person), I have to say I was pretty surprised by writer/director Paul Haggis' new picture, In the Valley of Elah, which many will describe as his follow-up to Crash, as it comes after it and all.

As the lead critic for the website to which this blog is an appendage, I'm not in the business of running film reviews way before the fact—this picture doesn't see theater screens until the fall, and the version I saw is missing one shot—but as others in the blogosphere are already blabbing about it, I feel a need to stay current. Also, given the near-brain-numbing chorus of blogosphere voices screeching about how this entity they call "Hollywood" isn't doing enough to get the populace properly agitated about the Islamist threat, it's interesting to see what a "Hollywood" filmmaker who takes on the subject of the Iraq war actually does.

In this case, the filmmaker shows us how that war distorts, mutates, deranges, the people who fight in it, and what happens when the derangement comes home. In this case, what happens when the derangement comes home in the form of a young soldier who goes AWOL almost immediately after a tour of duty in Iraq. This soldier's dad, played by Tommy Lee Jones, is Old Army—in conversations with his wife, played by Susan Sarandon, it's strongly suggested that his influence compelled his son to enlist—and when he goes to his son's camp to investigate the disappearance, full of blood and guts and thunder and pride that his son has worked to "bring democracy to a shithole," he subsequently stands by to see all of his illusions shattered. In ways too terrible for one to imagine. Which makes the fact that the picture is based on a real-life case almost unbearable. Michael Ledeen, Mark Steyn, Glenn Reynolds, et. al., will not be very happy about this film, and will do whatever they can to discredit it. That Paul Haggis is a Scientologist will probably figure in their fulminations. (I'm not big on Scientology myself, but I'll take a good movie from whomever I can get it. I'm just sayin'.)

Haggis' script and direction are largely impeccable here. The guy has got storytelling chops, and the dialogue here is free of the spot-on-speechifying that made Crash so squirmworthy. The structure's actually fairly tricky, as Jones discovers the truth about his son's sojourn in Iraq via sporadically rescued pieces of video from the son's cameraphone, but this doesn't play out in nearly as self-conscious and ostentatious a way as the hobbled La Ronde-based form of Crash did. The performances from the star-studded cast are all superb—I have to admit I did not even recognize Charlize Theron until about twenty minutes after she first showed up. So that's something.

Can a good, often wrenching, entirely pertinent film completely blow it in its last five minutes? I'm gonna save a thorough contemplation of that question until we get closer to the release of Elah. I'll just say for the moment that I really hope not.
-------------------------------------------
Ed Gonzalez responds, and didn't like it, and--surprise, surprise--calls it racist.
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Post by Mister Tee »

Wells, if anyone needs reminding, really liked Crash, so I don't buy his "forget your resentment over Brokeback Mountain" revisionism -- he's like the right-wingers who say civil rights were important in the 60s, but now we need to move on: when you go back, you find most of them were against civil rights in the 60s as well.

We saw the trailer for this last week, and my wife's immediate impression was "Son of 'Missing'".
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Post by anonymous1980 »

I hope it doesn't mean a fourth consecutive Oscar nod for the Walker, Texas Ranger co-creator.
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Post by Sabin »

Jeffrey Wells watches 'The Valley of Elah'. Bottom line, whether it hits, misses, or just wins an Oscar in spite of being horrible, Paul Haggis is the writer of the decade and this probably won't stumble him up...

Paul Haggis's In The Valley of Elah (Warner Independent, 9.21 or 9.28) is more than just a respectable true-life drama, and a helluva lot more than the sum of its parts. I think it's close to an epic-level achievement because it's four well-integrated things at once -- a first-rate murder-mystery, a broken-heart movie about parents and children and mistakes, a delivery device for an Oscar-level performance by Tommy Lee Jones (and two very moving ones by Charlize Theron and Susan Sarandon), and a tough political statement about the legacy of the Iraq War -- about how the furies from that godawful conflict are swirling high and onto westward currents and gradually seeping into our souls.

The best films are always the ones that don't seem to be doing all that much, but then gradually sneak up on you, laying groundwork and planting seeds and lighting all kinds of fires and feelings. Elah is one of these. It's a damn-near-perfect film of its kind. There's one moment at the very end that could have been played down a bit more (i.e., a little less on-the-nose), but others I've spoken to don't agree. I'm trying to think of other potholes but they're not coming to mind.

Elah isn't some concoction, some tricks-of-the-trade movie that's mainly about pushing buttons and playing audiences like an organ. It's primarily about respecting real-life experience and refining this into art. Haggis's screenplay is based on a true story that happened in the summer of '03, and was first reported a year later in a Playboy magazine article by Mark Boals, called "Death and Dishonor." It came from Boal interviewing Lanny Davis, a former U.S. Army M.P., about the death of his son, who had been reported AWOL following a tour of duty in Baghdad. Haggis bought the rights and created a somewhat fictionalized version, although he stuck to the basic bones.

So let's not hear any carping about this being another bleeding-heart, anti-Iraq War movie by a Hollywood leftie -- it happened. In fact, to hear it from Davis (whom I called the day after I first saw Elah on 6.19), the real story is even darker and more damning.

Elah has been screening for critics over the last two or three weeks, and I know it's definitely skewing positive, but this is one of those times when I don't care if everyone understands how good it is or not. All right, I do care because it's nice to be agreed with and I want to see this film break the Middle-Eastern conflict curse (i.e., the U.S. moviegoer mentality that apparently doesn't want to know about anything Iraq or Afghanistan-y, an attitude that arguably killed or severely damaged A Mighty Heart at the box office) but I know what this thing is and that's that.

Forget Crash, or rather forget whatever resentments you might have about Haggis's film taking the Best Picture Oscar from Brokeback Mountain. And forget the beefs about Haggis writing scripts that are too explicit and surface-y with not enough subtext. Elah, trust me, is a much better, more plain-spoken film than Crash was. It's about real people, real hurt, real tragedy. My first thought after seeing it was that Warner Independent should show it to all the Crash haters in order to put that dog to bed.

Elah is one of those very rare birds that starts out like a what-happened? procedural you may have seen before, and before you know it it's doing something extra, and then something else and then another thing altogether. Before you know it Haggis has four or five balls in the air, and when it's over you're heading out to your car and going, "Hmmm...yeah...wow."

I was thinking at first that Elah resembles David Greene's Friendly Fire, a 1979 TV movie based on a true story about the parents of a Vietnam veteran cutting through red tape to find out how their son actually died. But before the what- happened-and-whodunit? story even gets going you can feel the undercurrent of grief in Jones, whose character, Hank Deerfield, is based on Lanny Davis.

Jones' weathered, old-guy face is full of the suppressed shock and grief and guilt that any parent feels when his or her son has gotten into trouble or otherwise done something inexplicable. And his performance, which is all about feelings being kept in check, like it always is with any old-school military guy, just keeps getting sadder and more affecting.

Haggis originally wanted Clint Eastwood to play Deerfield, but it's a role that has Jones' history and DNA all over it. He owns characters like Deerfield and that sheriff in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, and the small-town sheriff he plays in Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men, which comes out in November. All of them plain-spoken, craggy-faced Texas dudes with turkey necks, paunchy guts and wells of sorrow in their eyes.

The fact that In The Valley of Elah is a gripping investigative procedural is almost the least of its attributes. I felt I was swimming in holy water five minutes into it. Haggis's early dialogue feels tight and true, and Jones and Sarandon's acting in the early scenes feels like the playing of two master violinists. (There's a sad phone call scene between them that choked me up, and Sarandon has a flash- of-rage moment that pierces right through). Add this to Roger Deakins' cinema- tography and Jo Francis's editing, and any half-aware observer can tell from the get-go that this is very high quality stuff. You just know it. You can feel it a hundred different ways.

Red-staters and blue-staters alike are going to get where this film is coming from -- they're going to feel it in their hearts, and make all the connections on their own without going off into specific tirades or defenses.

It's not so much Haggis-the-Hollywood-liberal as the story itself that's making the point here, which is that the Iraq War is primarily responsible for the terrible thing that this film turns on. It's heartening to hear (as Jones' character says at one point) that David sometimes does win out over Goliath -- the title refers to the valley in Israel where their ancient conflict took place -- but the Iraq War is a thousand plunderers and a thousand knives. It is obviously laying waste left and right, and will continue to do so for a long time to come, and for what?

(Iraq is going to suffer a blood bath -- maybe like Ireland, maybe like Rwanda -- and eventually break apart like Yugoslavia and become two or three countries. People have to tend their own nests. There's no other way. It would be nice if it were otherwise, but the hard rain has only begin to fall over there.)

In some quarters In The Valley of Elah is going to be seen in the same light as Grace is Gone (dad-in-denial John Cusack mourning the death of his wife who was killed in Iraq), although it is much more powerful and assured.

Some might be more muted in their admiration, and they wouldn't be wrong or right in saying so, but I think In The Valley of Elah is an unmistakable Best Picture contender. It's an American tragedy that every last person in this country, from whatever region or persuasion, is going to "get" deep down. Except with aberrations like Chicago, this groundwater quality is usually what gives a Best Picture nominee traction with voters.

I believe that Haggis is now a prime contender for Best Director and for Best Adapted Screenplay. Ditto Deakins for Best Cinematography and Francis for Best Editing. I can see Theron being talked up in the Best Actress category also (her role as a single-mom investigator is much less showy and grandstanding than the blue-collar character she played in North Country), and Sarandon, depending on the competition, could wind up in the Best Supporting Actress category.

Every Elah supporting player delivers a straight-up, no-fuss performance. The best are Jason Patric, James Franco, Josh Brolin, Jonathan Tucker, Frances Fisher, Rick Gonzalez, Barry Corbin, Wayne Duvall, Brent Briscoe, Mehcad Brooks, Brad William Henke and Kathy Lamkin. (Watching it is like an No Country for Old Men old-home reunion for Jones, Brolin, Corbin and Lamkin.)
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