September 17, 2007

"In the Valley of Elah"

Here's an excerpt from my review in the 9/24/07 issue of The American Conservative:

"In the Valley of Elah" is a modest-budget drama laden with Hollywood luminaries. Oscar-magnet screenwriter Paul Haggis ("Crash" and "Million Dollar Baby") directs fellow Academy Award winners Tommy Lee Jones ("The Fugitive"), Charlize Theron ("Monster"), and Susan Sarandon ("Dead Man Walking") in a spare, somber, and moving police procedural.

"Elah" is based on the notorious 2003 murder of Spc. Richard Davis by his fellow soldiers shortly after their unit arrived stateside from combat in Iraq. At some point after a drunken brawl outside a strip club, Davis was stabbed 32 times. His comrades-at-arms then dismembered his body, burnt it, and hid the remains in the woods.

Working from Mark Boal's Playboy article, Haggis wrote the central role of the victim's father, a laconic retired Army sergeant, a former military policeman in Vietnam, for his mentor Clint Eastwood, but the 77-year-old told him he has retired from acting. So Haggis turned to 61-year-old Tommy Lee Jones, who, as his formidable performance in "Elah" demonstrates, is still very much in his prime.

As a director, Haggis's strength is that he's not intimidated by his screenwriter's fame. Haggis edited out an hour of his own dialogue, making "Elah" far quieter than the sometimes brilliant but showy "Crash." Here, Haggis lets his superb cast carry the film through long silent takes.

For example, the morning after the corpse is sent to the coroner for identification, Jones is awoken by a knock on his motel room door. Outside is a soldier in full dress uniform. Having worn the same uniform to deliver the same message to other parents, the despairing father knows what's coming. For 15 seconds he struggles to prepare himself to receive the blow in the only way he knows, willing his tired body to stand at rigid military attention.

In a brief role, Sarandon is even better than Jones. Having lost her older son to a helicopter crash in training, she asks her husband, "Couldn't you have left me just one?" When he protests that he didn't tell their boy to enlist, she responds that their son couldn't have grown up in their home without feeling that he'd never be a man until he served. Jones has no answer.

I would guess that Haggis' strength is writing from personal feelings. "Crash" was inspired by his being car-jacked in 1991 by two black criminals. And "Elah" probably had a lot to do with his having four kids. I suspect "Elah" will have a big impact on people with teenage sons, and tend to bore most everybody else.


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3 comments:

  1. Anonymous9/17/07, 6:58 PM

    I saw the movie Steve. It was crap. Were you even watching the same movie?

    Jones DOES give a good performance, but the movie was one giant polemic on the evils of America, the military, and ordinary Americans.

    Jones finds out his son was just as "evil and sadistic" as the rest of the military, and is himself a brutal racist.

    What's the point? Why should we even CARE about solving the mystery or Jones character if everyone and everything is loathesome?

    Which is the point. Haggis like all other too-rich, too-drugged out Hollywood screenwriters, wants to aim his self-hatred out to ordinary people and their institutions. Particularly the military and particularly ordinary white guys who are of course the source of all evil. Excepting himself of course.

    As Exhibit A on Haggis and the rest of Hollywood's class-race hatred for Americans Elah is interesting. Other than that, and particularly as a film, it's as boring as most agit-prop.

    [And Theron can't act her way out of a paper bag, once again she's "ugly" so you know it's "serious acting."]

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  2. Anonymous9/18/07, 2:02 PM

    Tommy Lee Jones is the son of a Texas oil worker who was shipped back east to a reeducation camp called Harvard. He is the consummate Ivy League grad. He is animated by his own Competitive Moralism because that is the only way out for heads filled with the American Guilt Complex.

    The movie he directed a couple years back -- about the most evil people on the planet, the US Border Patrol, (Three Burials for...) -- was an over-the-top cartoon in its depiction of the working class white villains.

    I searched and did not find a Steve Sailer review of Three Burials Melquiades Estrada.

    But in keeping with the pattern of aging men intensifying their tribal identities (think Carlos Santana), any project Mr Jones does in the twilight of his career will likely have the same political message: whites as a group do not deserve any authority, moral or otherwise. Tommy Lee Jones' tribe is the peculiar tribe at the top of the left wing moral pyramid: the anti-white white man.

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  3. Anonymous9/19/07, 4:36 AM

    I thought "Crash" was absolute crap. Phony and contrived. A typical Hollywood liberal's look at racial problems in L.A., it had nothing to do with life in L.A. as I know it.

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