Casualties of war

>> Paul Haggis’s In the Valley of Elah focuses
on the psychological fallout of the Iraq invasion

by MATTHEW HAYS

In the past few years, Canadian Paul Haggis has emerged as one of the most controversial figures in Hollywood. Not because of his anti-Iraq war stance—hardly an outrageous position to assume in Tinseltown—but rather because of questions surrounding the quality of his work. When some were urging people not to “give away” the ending to Million Dollar Baby (Haggis wrote the screenplay), I was like, “How could anyone not see the entire plot coming by the opening credits?”

And when Crash took the Best Picture Oscar, it was a blunder of Forrest Gump or Titanic proportions; nay, the best film of that year was neither Crash nor Brokeback, but rather A History of Violence. And let’s not even broach the subject of that dreary James Bond rebooting. (Given how bad the Pierce “Invisible Car” Brosnan Bond entries were, anything would look good in comparison.)

So Haggis’s latest effort, In the Valley of Elah—which he both writes and directs—arrives as something of a shocker. Genuinely surprising because it’s not bad at all; though it’s hardly a breakthrough of any kind, it’s part of a burgeoning cluster of films that are now working their way through America’s collective Iraq-invasion hangover.

The film opens as Tommy Lee Jones and Susan Sarandon learn that their son, who has recently returned from a tour of duty in Iraq, has gone missing from his military base. This is all the stranger because the lad was a model soldier. When Jones goes looking, he finds that his son has been murdered. The police have no suspects.

It’s a pretty classic set-up, though well-handled, in particular by this astounding cast, who pull the whole affair up a couple of notches. Jones and Sarandon give good torment, while Charlize Theron plays a tough investigator, deftly pushing aside the sexist roadblocks put up by various other cops. While you’re rooting for her, you’re fully aware that her type has become a generic stock character itself, the descendant of a ’70s Jane Fonda heroine or Julia Roberts’s Erin Brockovich.

Ultimately, In the Valley of Elah is a whodunit, with Jones feverishly trying to figure out what happened to his son (hint: it’s not good). As films like Elah process the trauma that is Iraq, they follow in the path many post-Vietnam films took. A number of those movies—including Coming Home and The Deer Hunter—examined post-traumatic stress suffered by American soldiers who were asked to go and fight in a war many later felt was just plain wrong. Taking the soldiers’ perspective in a culture steeped in you’re-either-with-the-troops-or-against-them rhetoric is ostensibly a clever way of dealing with issues surrounding the war. The theme, invariably, is that the war—Vietnam or Iraq, take your pick—has pitted Americans against themselves. Sadly, this leaves out those who have lost the most in the equation: Iraqi civilians. Cinema, it seems, is much like the rest of the media, and has a blind spot concerning this group of individuals, who were guilty of nothing beyond being ruled by a crackpot dictator, a man American foreign policy helped to create.

In the Valley of Elah
opens this Friday, Sept. 28

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