In the Valley of Elah

(2007)
Directed By: Paul Haggis
Written By: Mark Boal & Paul Haggis

Cast:
Tommy Lee Jones - Hank Deerfield
Charlize Theron - Det. Emily Sanders
Jason Patric - Lt. Kirklander
Susan Sarandon - Joan Deerfield


Tommy Lee Jones stars as Hank Deerfield a man who is searching for someone. Instead of the usual fugitive however the person he is searching for is his son Mike - who disappears after coming home from Iraq. Hank, an ex military police officer, takes it upon himself to seek him out but when his remains are found singed and scattered in an empty field the case becomes one of looking for his killers.
(Charlize Theron) is an ambitious military criminal investigator who is assigned to the case. She proves throughout the film that she is not to be messed with, especially by any chauvinistic co-workers. Both will stop at nothing to find the killer(s).
The clear message of all this is that war changes you. You don’t return the same person you left as because your experiences make you and/or break you. Unfortunately a great many are broken by what they experience. This not only effects them directly but also their families as is the case in one scene where an ex-Iraqi soldier’s wife is drowned in the bathtub. In some ways the horrors of Iraq aren’t left there in the dust thousands of miles away but come home in the thoughts and/or actions of the soldiers returning.
Tommy Lee Jones does an excellent job playing a hardened veteran looking for his son. You can tell he has been trough a lot but there is nothing to prepare him for what he goes through in the story.
In the film he sees an immigrant man putting up the American flag upside down. He tells him, that its totally wrong - that a flag upside down is an international distress signal. At the end of the film we see Hank give the man a tattered flag that his son sent him from Iraq. He hoists flag into the breeze… and it is upside down. Perhaps this says it all.
3 1/2 stars