In the Valley of Elah [Blu-ray]
by Paul Haggis
![In the Valley of Elah [Blu-ray]](/images/In-the-Valley-of-Elah-Blu-ray-B0011VIODW-L.jpg)
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Charlize Theron, James Franco, Susan Sarandon, Tommy Lee JonesDirector: Paul Haggis
Brand: Warner Brothers
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language); French (Original Language); Spanish (Original Language); French (Dubbed); Spanish (Dubbed)
Format: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.40:1
Running Time: 121 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2008-02-19
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Warner Home Video
Movie Reviews of In the Valley of Elah [Blu-ray]
Movie Review: Tommy Lee Jones is brilliant, brilliant, brilliant
Summary: 4 Stars
The over long Valley of Elah delivers its anti-war sermon with all the subtlety of a sledghammer. Trust us, we get it. War turns people into creatures their parents don't recognize. It always has and it always will--that's what war is, and several much better movies have addressed it, like The Deer Hunter and Born on the Fourth of July. If VOE had contented itself with being a murder mystery and character study and let us draw our own conclusions on the order of The Hurt Locker, it would have been a much more powerful film. As it is, we're bludgeoned by both the main plot and an unnecessary subplot about an Army wife who is terrified of her husband. Throw in an element about how the flag is flown just in case we missed things the first time around, and the message becomes borderline insulting.
Inspired by a true story as is most fiction, the gist of the plot is that Pvt. Mike Deerfield has gone AWOL shortly after returning from combat in Iraq. His father Hank, who just happens to be an ex MP is alerted to Mike's status by a phone call from the base attempting to locate him. Hank solves the case despite the obstacles and lack of enthusiasm he gets from the Army and the local police and some very painful information he unearths. And oh, yeah--did I tell you the Army and the local police weren't helping much? The title comes from the Biblical location of David's epic slaying of Goliath, but I have no idea what that has to do with this story.
*Spoiler Alert*
What is given the buildup for a grand conspiracy turns out to be a squalid, pointless Saturday night crime rather easily solved.
That said, this movie is a must see for the splendid acting which makes the weak script irrelevant. Charlize Theron is a wonderfully understated detective, Susan Sarandon is heartbreaking as Mike's mother, and Josh Brolin is a splendid good ol' boy police chief. The standout however, is Tommy Lee Jones' exquisitely nuanced performance. As Hank, Jones manages to balance and make believable an experienced investigator's exasperation with incompetence, a father's guilt, love and pain, and a soldier's discipline. It's one of the most amazing things I've ever seen and thank goodness the director had enough sense to spend a lot of time on Jones' face. At best, this movie would rate two stars for script alone, and three stars only without Jones' stunning performance. See this movie for the acting alone. It's worth it.
Summary of In the Valley of Elah [Blu-ray]
Mike Deerfield returns to the U.S. after his tour of duty in Iraq and abruptly goes missing. His father Hank, a spit-and-polish ex-MP from the Vietnam era, goes looking for him. What he finds goes to the heart of American combat experiences in the Iraqi conflict. Academy Award?-winning* Crash filmmaker Paul Haggis teams with Oscar?- winning* actors Tommy Lee Jones, Charlize Theron and Susan Sarandon in a probing, powerful, fact-based look at fathers and sons.and at a nation and the young soldiers it sends into battle. Jones plays Hank, whose quest lays bare a tangled web of cover-up, murder, mystery and profound revelation about the personal costs of war.In career Army officer Hank Deerfield's worldview, the American military exists to bring order to the world, and honor and dignity to every one of its soldiers. As played by Tommy Lee Jones, in a layered performance that will haunt the viewer long after the film is over, Deerfield wears the Army life like he does his standard-issue white T-shirts--unconsciously making a cheap motel bed with crisp inspection-ready corners. Yet if war is hell, the purgatory for the relatives of damaged soldiers can cause far more anguish, and Paul Haggis' quietly devastating In the Valley of Elah tells this story through Deerfield, who is desperately trying to piece together the fate of his adored son Mike, a soldier in Iraq.
Mike's company has returned from duty, but he is missing; Hank flies from Tennessee to Fort Rudd in the Southwest, to conduct his own investigation into the disappearance. There he meets a smart but put-upon police officer (Charlize Theron, glammed-down but still showing a bit too much sexy collarbone for a cop) who also smells something off in the Army's official story of the disappearance. The two form an unlikely team, but as a friend tells Deerfield early on, "You gotta trust somebody sometime, Hank," and Mike's vanishing is Hank's tipping point.
As Hank pieces together the horrifying story of Mike's fate, the incremental pain becomes etched in Jones' ragged features, and the camera captures all of it--far more powerfully than could a million words of reportage from the front lines. Theron's performance is also strong, and Susan Sarandon is moving if underutilized as Hank's grief-stricken wife, robbed of the simple nuclear family life she so wanted. "They shouldn't send heroes to places like Iraq," says one of Mike's buddies late in the film, and it's the viewers' collective sorrow--and the film's great achievement--to feel that at the deepest human level. --A.T. Hurley
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