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Ten years after losing his older son in a helicopter crash, retired sergeant Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones) gets the call that his younger son, Mike (Jonathan Tucker), is missing. Mike’s unit had just returned from their tour in Iraq, and he disappeared just days later. No one’s been able to reach him—and no one seems to know where he might have gone. So Hank gets in his truck and drives to the base—the same base where he was once stationed—to find his son.
Once he arrives, no one seems to be able—or willing—to help him. The men in Mike’s unit swear they don’t know anything, and the local police department won’t let him file a missing persons report. The only clues he gets are the images of Iraq that Mike captured on his cell phone—which Hank managed to steal from his drawer.
Director Paul Haggis (who won an Oscar for Crash) isn’t known for his subtlety. Quite the contrary, in fact. So it’s not exactly a surprise that In the Valley of Elah has all the subtlety of a cement block.
To its credit, In the Valley of Elah tells a gripping story—one that’s made even more powerful by Tommy Lee Jones’s no-nonsense performance. But, unfortunately, Haggis gets so involved in making his message painfully clear that, somewhere along the way, he forgets about the storytelling.
Other than Hank, who comes to life on screen (thanks in no small part to Jones), the characters are rather flat. We don’t get to know very much about Mike, and the rest of the men at the base are little more than nameless, faceless soldiers. No one really stands out as being a remarkable character. And although it’s clear that there’s some sort of story behind Detective Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron), the character who shows up on screen isn’t all that interesting. She’s just a detective who’s trying to prove her worth to her colleagues—but who’s always a step behind.
Eventually, the story begins to drag, until the mystery is solved in a disappointingly anti-climactic conclusion. In fact, the part that should have been the key to the whole story feels more like an aside: “Oh, yeah. By the way…here’s what happened to Mike.” The characters just seem to shrug it off, as though it were really no big deal after all.
Since I’ve seen Haggis’s Oscar-winning Crash, I know that he’s capable of telling a powerful story and creating solid characters—while still managing to make his not-so-subtle point. But with In the Valley of Elah, he focuses too much on the preaching and too little on his story—and, in the end, it fails to have an impact on its audience.
