In the Valley of Elah
Once again, the smug Canadian hack Paul Haggis wants to tell us what’s wrong with America. Haggis brings his trademark sledgehammer preachiness (”Million Dollar Baby,” “Crash”) and capricious, incoherent storytelling (”Flags of Our Fathers”) to a morose whodunit about a military father (Tommy Lee Jones) investigating his son’s murder on the grounds of a New Mexico Army base. As in “Crash,” Haggis’s shrill and simplistic Best Picture winner, he sketches his characters so broadly that his actors become numbingly repetitious. Jones is upright, stoic and droll. Susan Sarandon, as his wife, shows up only to weep. Charlize Theron, as a civilian detective, is insecure and self-righteous. And Haggis can’t draw any distinction between the soldiers who served in Iraq with Jones’ son. They all speak in the same traumatized monotone.
I can’t decide whether he’s a worse writer or director. He can’t write believable dialogue — it’s all showy speechifying. And as a storyteller he’s inept. “In the Valley of Elah” (the incredibly pretentious title comes from the place where David fought Goliath) begins with indecipherable cellphone images of something awful that happened in Iraq. Later, Jones swipes his son’s phone from his barrack and, with incredible ease, hooks up with a hacker who agrees to salvage the videos contained in the desert-fried device. Every once in a while Jones will go back to his hotel room and open a video that’s been emailed to him. Haggis splashes the fragmented, pixelated images on the screen, and we can’t tell at all what we’re looking at. We learn very little from these faux-authentic detours, and there’s nothing to do but wait until Haggis returns to the video he teases at the beginning. It’s a shockingly arbitrary device, even for Haggis. What’s weird about “In the Valley of Elah” is that Haggis tries to make it incredibly manipulative, but it still leaves you numb. The audience is a step ahead of his leadfooted maneuvers. When he finally reveals what happens to Jones’ son, it comes in such a flat and awkwardly written scene that you may not realize it’s supposed to be the climax.
Haggis wants you to know that the Iraq war is tearing at the fabric of America. It forces our boys to do terrible things. Then the rest of us have to watch terrible movies about it.