In the Valley of Elah
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 Sometimes finding the truth is easier than facing itAcademy Award winning actors Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron team up for deep and emotional thriller ‘In The Valley of Elah’. Written and directed by the man who brought us Crash in 2004, Paul Higgins delivers the story of a police detective who tries to uncover the truth behind his son's disappearance following his return from a tour of duty in Iraq. Retired Sgt. Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones) gets a distress call from his son Mike (Jonathan Tucker) before Mike goes AWOL at the army base. The army plays him around, and the local authorities won't give him any attention either, they insist on Hank contacting the military police. Then a burned, dismembered body is found near the military base. Mike's identity is confirmed. Whilst suppressing his grief and comforting his wife (Susan Sarandon), Hank is determined to find out what happened and who killed his son. At first, since the murder appears to have happened within military grounds, the case is out of the police's jurisdiction. They believe it's a drug deal gone bad. A sharp observer, Hank convinces Detective Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron) it's a cover-up. Sanders opens an active investigation against her colleagues' scrutiny. The circumstances lead Hank and Sanders to suspect a few of Mike's bunkmates, but there is not enough evidence to convince Sanders' superiors or the army to do anything. Frustration leads Mike to conduct his own investigations. What he finds shatters his own convictions. A mystery at the core and inspired by true events, In the Valley of Elah is actually a complex social drama examining some tough issues that will without doubt generate debates and discussions. I enjoyed this movie and I think it’s one of those war films that will work simply because its not directly about the war itself but the consequences and the conditioning of the soldiers that take part. Without being too preachy the film gives us a clear direction and an important underlying message that serves to be both informative and intriguing. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.  With America divided between hating the war in Iraq and supporting the soldiers who are fighting it, it’s perhaps unsurprising Hollywood has taken such an inordinately long time to address the conflict. Add the fact that US cinemagoers have so far proved stubbornly resistant to movies that have tackled the situation and A-list filmmakers like Paul Crash Haggis find themselves in something of a pickle. How do you make drama out of a continuing tragedy without seeming naive, opportunistic and politically partisan? How do you critique the Bush administration’s policy in the Gulf without slating the troops that have been sent out to enforce it? And how do you do both while still managing to turn a profit? Unwieldy, uneven and inconclusive as it is, In The Valley Of Elah goes a long way towards answering two of those questions, if not quite the third. This it does by bringing the war back home, literally, in such a way that even a die-hard patriot like Tommy Lee Jones’ Hank Deerfield is forced to rethink his position. A retired Army sergeant and ex-military policeman who has already lost one child in the name of Uncle Sam, Hank is perturbed to hear his other son Mike has gone AWOL after returning unannounced from a tour of duty. Driving from his home in Tennessee to his boy’s base in New Mexico, Jones’ world promptly caves in when Mike’s bloodied remains are discovered. The more Hank and local cop Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron) investigate, though, the more it becomes clear the soldier’s disappearance is part of a larger cover-up involving atrocities in Iraq, jurisdictional red tape and scrambled mobile phone footage with dark secrets to spill. Given the similarities to police procedurals both good (In The Heat Of The Night) and bad (The General’s Daughter), it’s inevitable that Elah – named after the Biblical location of David’s battle against Goliath – has problems sustaining tension en route to its somewhat underwhelming resolution. (Charlize’s fight to be respected by her sexist superiors, for example, is so familiar as to be a virtual cliché.) More effective is the way Haggis uses the tropes of a whodunnit (red herrings, incriminating evidence, convenient agents of exposition such as Frances Fisher’s inexplicably topless barkeep) to highlight a wider crime of conscience that’s being committed against both an unjustly occupied country and a young army ill-equipped to handle the trauma of pursuing a vastly unpopular campaign. After his army son goes AWOL, retired military policeman Hank Deerfield (Jones) heads off to find his errant boy. His search proves complex, however, and he enlists the reluctant help of a local detective (Theron). Tommy Lee Jones doesn’t need to prove his acting chops, not that anyone would dare request it. But if he did, this month’s two performances - the other in No Country For Old Men - would comfortably do the job. Elah, the second directorial outing from Crash’s Paul Haggis, was supposed to be a victory lap for an undoubted new filmmaking talent, but it’s Jones’ film to its boots. Jones admittedly has a stock character - stoic, manly, seasoned by the years and the mileage - but it’s the subtle variations that make him a joy to watch. In The Fugitive, he added implacable and a soupçon of sympathetic; in Men In Black, he served it deadpan. Here he surpasses previous accomplishments with his layered portrait of Sergeant Hank Deerfield. This is an older, weary Jones, lacking the breezy self-assurance of his ’90s thrillers. Deerfield displays the tics of long service - shining his shoes before bed, neatly packing a bag with military-issue white T-shirts before setting off in search of his missing army son. There’s a lovely moment as he sits in his undershirt in a laundromat, when he rushes to don a (still wet) shirt before he can bear to talk to Charlize Theron’s lady cop. Such martial habits emphasise the warm heart beneath and the sadness in his eyes. It’s devastatingly affecting, and most likely the performance of the year. Without Jones, though, the source material (based on a true story that appeared in Playboy) could have come across as plodding - a sort of The General’s Daughter with lofty aspirations. Haggis’ screenplay tries to be both whodunnit and political comment, and succeeds far better in the former - an effective riddle signalling military cover-up, drug trafficking, suicide and murder. Frustratingly, Haggis still displays the same soft spot for overt symbolism and grand dramatic gestures that made Crash such a divisive experience. But despite his continued emotional prompting, it’s the performances he elicits from his quality cast that make this a more convincing and personal picture than his sometimes artifical, surprise Oscar-winner. Susan Sarandon and Theron stand out. Sarandon has a tiny role, transformed by a late-night phone call with Jones that is beautifully played, her anger directed at the father whose love for the military put their children in the firing line. Theron, meanwhile, is a beleaguered police lieutenant and single mum, a downbeat role she plays with depth and honesty. So is it a portrait of the dehumanising effects of war, or the poor state of the nation, or just a murder mystery? A slightly fumbled last act would have us believe it’s all three, and it almost convinces. But compared to the recent big ideas of The Kingdom and Lions For Lambs, Elah is a simple family tragedy. Approach it as a personal take on universal injustices, free from bombast and preachiness, and you’ll be rewarded. Tense, powerful and considerably less crass than Crash, Elah may be jammed with ideas that don’t all connect, but Jones’ devastating performance makes this a compassionate and very human look at the Iraq conflict. Tommy Lee Jones ... Hank Deerfield Charlize Theron ... Det. Emily Sanders Jason Patric ... Lt. Kirklander Susan Sarandon ... Joan Deerfield James Franco ... Sgt. Dan Carnelli Barry Corbin ... Arnold Bickman Josh Brolin ... Chief Buchwald Frances Fisher ... Evie Wes Chatham ... Corporal Steve Penning Jake McLaughlin ... Spc. Gordon Bonner Mehcad Brooks ... Spc. Ennis Long Jonathan Tucker ... Mike Deerfield Wayne Duvall ... Detective Nugent Victor Wolf ... Private Robert Ortiez Brent Briscoe ... Detective Hodge http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0478134/ Download Torrent 
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