Lost boys: 'In the Valley of Elah' & 'Into the Wild'

Is there an actor working today who conveys a more mythically American presence than Tommy Lee Jones? His endlessly fascinating face unites opposites in our national character, making him both suave and brutal, calculating and homespun. He's tough, but smart too (that Harvard education!), and while his characters generally play on the side of the angels, they don't hesitate to get their hands dirty. Like Clint Eastwood, Jones is an avatar of gunslinger American manliness. Sure, he's smiling, but you know what he could do to you if he let himself; and he knows you know. His steely, taunting grin hints at latent violence and a malicious pleasure in his own lethality.

In writer-director Paul Haggis's In the Valley of Elah, that confident grin is gone, replaced by a harrowed visage of loss. Jones plays a retired military policeman named Hank Deerfield, whose two sons worshiped him and followed him into the military, with grievous results. At the film's outset, Deerfield has already lost one to a helicopter training accident; and when he and his wife (Susan Sarandon) receive word their other son has gone AWOL while back from a tour of duty in Iraq, Deerfield drives out to a New Mexico Army base to untangle the mystery--which soon takes a gruesome turn when his son's body is discovered, hacked and burned beyond recognition, in a field near the base.

In the Valley of Elah is nominally a police procedural, with Jones dusting off his old Army criminal investigation skills to join forces with Lt. Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron), a civilian police detective who smells a rat behind the military's eagerness to take over the investigation. But the whodunit form is really beside the point, except insofar as it allows Haggis to calibrate the breakdown of Deer-field's stoicism, the furrowing of yet another crease of misery in his deeply-lined face. What Haggis (whose last movie was the Oscar-winning Crash) is after is a certain type of American male patriotism, and what happens when it founders on a literally unspeakable loss.

Deerfield, we understand, is the prototype of the American who supports the troops and their mission because he believes in our national mission generally. He's a workingman who lives in a modest neighborhood where every house flies the flag; who spit-shines his shoes every morning; who embarrassedly addresses a stripper in a dive where he's investigating his son's final hours as "ma'am." Driving past a grade school he sees the flag flying upside down and stops to roust the school custodian and set things right. His patriotism, in other words, is deeply entwined with chivalry, stoical self-denial, and an unquestioning respect for authority. But as the horrific mystery of his son's final hours unfolds, and he is stymied in his attempt to learn more, Deerfield lashes out in anger. "My son spent the last seventeen months bringing democracy to a shithole and serving his country," he seethes to Theron. "He deserves better than this."

I thought Crash was a bad movie, didactic behind its meretricious dazzle, burdened with self-congratulatory lectures on racism, garish plot manipulations, and a clumsy reach for allegory. Elah is a big improvement. It proceeds quietly, and for the most part Haggis lets his story's meanings bubble upward from its materials, rather than manipulating them to make a point. He keeps the politics largely offstage. Yes, we hear George Bush droning on TV in the background, and a scene showing a flag-draped coffin reminds us how assiduously the White House has labored to keep this image of war's cost off our TV screens. But the focus is on the far more general sorrow of losing a son to any war.

In the Valley of Elah lingers on the details of dread. In one early scene, an 8 a.m. knock at Hank's motel door reveals a somber Army officer, and Hank retreats to the bathroom, ostensibly to stanch a nick he has inflicted on himself while shaving, but really to delay as long as possible the awful news he knows is coming. Equally gripping is the portrayal of what grief does to a marriage, as Sarandon explodes in recrimination, blaming Deer-field for pushing their son into the military. "Living in this house, he couldn't feel like a man if he hadn't gone," she rages. "Both my boys--you could've left me one!" Roger Deakins's cinematography has a bleached-out look, pale and ghostly; Charlize Theron wears severe gray blazers and her hair pulled back, as if in mourning; and Mark Isham's Philip Glass-like score exudes somber gravity, lending a funereal air.

The movie ends badly, with a series of ugly revelations intended to drive home the savage desensitization of American soldiers in Iraq, and a closing symbolic gesture of almost incredible heavy-handedness. Some will insist that Haggis finally found his focus, that the film needed to be topical and polemical from the get-go. To me it felt as if he took a subtle, universal study of grief and turned it over to MoveOn.org.