Word: hank
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...days after returning stateside from a tour of duty in Iraq, a young soldier goes AWOL. His father, Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones), himself a retired non-commissioned officer, goes in search of him. It soon becomes clear that his son was murdered and dismembered near a military base where he was temporarily reassigned, the chief suspects being four buddies with whom he served overseas. But In the Valley of Elah is not so much a whodunit as a whydunnit, an investigation of why a group of quite ordinary American soldiers would find themselves involved in such a brutal...
...with a gritty, honest sensibility, particularly attuned to life as it's lived in our country at the lower edges of society. But he's also a pretty canny movie guy, initially presenting his material as a fairly conventional mystery, with the icily contained and taciturn Hank, who was a criminal investigator during his military career, playing a fairly typical wild card - the guy who keeps asking difficult questions while everyone else pretty much wants to process the case as briskly as possible. Hank is a bleak sort of man, perfectly content to eat in coffee shops featuring Formica...
...Somehow, this unlikely pair form an alliance, mostly because each of them is looked upon as annoying irrelevance by both the military and the local police, but also because single mom Emily is embarking on the kind of marginal life - all low pay and grim dutifulness - that Hank has endured all his years. This elicits his (austerely expressed) sympathy as well as ours. Yet, in a sense, everything I've so far described - the plot, the physical and emotional landscape of the picture - is a diversion, an attempt to lull us by evoking genre conventions, make us think...
...Hank knows a lot - the number of men in an infantry, the way a blue car looks green under a yellow streetlight - but he has much to learn about the effect of this war on today's young men. One vet has drowned his wife's dog, and later drowns her in a bathtub. Hank has also hears that Mike had been called Doc by his comrades. Why? Because, on patrol in Iraq, Doc would "stick his hand in some hadji's wound and say, 'Does that hurt?' And the hadji would say yes. Then he'd stick...
...Jones, Theron and Sarandon, have nuances worth noting; and even the ones capable of committing the most heinous crimes seem like decent people to whom some awful thing happened. (Special mention to Wes Chatham, who could be Matt Damon's younger, cuter brother, as a soldier testifying to Hank about the killing.) The combination of dedicated actors and a superior script helps make Elah a far more satisfying film than Crash...