In The Valley Of Elah

Success can be its own worst enemy. In Hollywood, winning the ‘Best Picture’ Oscar is a creative kiss of death. As an award, it’s more of a fashionable choice than a serious referendum on quality. Since 1986, there are only two directors who have produced any creatively significant work after winning their Best Picture Oscar. Mel Gibson won for Braveheart, and years later created the controversial The Passion. Oliver Stone won for Platoon, and years later produced JFK. Whether you liked them or not, those are the only post-Best Picture films where an artist took substantial risks to push themselves past their prior success, and on a certain level, succeeded.

Paul Haggis, the writer and director of the 2005 Best Picture winner Crash, isn’t immune to that post-Oscar hangover. That’s unsurprising, because his Oscar winning film was mediocre at best, a triumph of cheap sentiment over skill. Crash used auto accidents to illustrate how people in Los Angeles need sharp head trauma to be shocked out of their racism. One wonders what a master of social nuance like John Sayles, or a passionate firebrand like Spike Lee would have made of a similar conceit. What Haggis, appropriately enough, made of it was haggis, and it had all the appetizing value of ground sheep organs boiled in a stomach. There was some camp value in watching a Love Boat-worthy ensemble wander through storybook episodes of racism, but the moralizing left a ham-fisted stain of good intentions across the screen. In some ways, that moral shallowness is harmful because it creates the impression that racism is all just simple mis-understanding, and that hugging your Mexican housekeeper will make things all better.

In The Valley Of Elah, Haggis’ self-important follow-up to Crash, demands to be taken even more seriously while suffering from the same lack of imagination. Tommy Lee Jones plays Hank Deerfield, a retired Army sergeant with a face ready for installation on Mount Rushmore. He is investigating the murder of his son, a soldier who has just returned stateside after eighteen months in Iraq. When the military provides an unsatisfactory explanation of his son’s death, Deerfield enlists the help of detective Emily Sanders (played by the tautly pulled-back hair of Charlize Theron).

Deerfield is more soldier than man. Sanders is the lone woman on the police force. Wouldn’t you know it, but these two outsiders form an uneasy bond and start rocking the boat of the official investigation. Most of their investigation consists of waiting for phone calls, looking quietly at pictures, or unsuccessfully trying to intimidate authority figures. The mystery here is the most glacial police procedural released in the post-C.S.I. era, and the anti-war agenda is remarkable only in its blandness.

The film ends with Deerfield lecturing an immigrant janitor about flag-raising, before he raises an upside-down American flag as a distress signal. This hardly comes as a shocking ending, after the interminable anti-war stance of the film. The lack of subtlety is compounded by an overblown power ballad that croons over the closing credits. It’s a touch that would get laughed out of an undergrad’s first film, and couldn’t be any more cloying unless Haggis himself walked onscreen with a flowchart diagramming exactly who was David and what Goliath symbolized.

You can find more enlightening commentary in a bumper sticker. The shame is that Tommy Lee Jones is a first-class stoic and a national treasure as a crusty-old-man actor, but every aspect of the production is working against him. Susan Sarandon is similarly, almost aggressively wasted as his sobbing wife. There’s simply nothing evocative about anything on screen.

The primal mistake Haggis makes is assuming that his message is so very important it will survive the solemn style. Right off the bat, he waves the flag of pretension, using a biblically inflected, Google-worthy title – the valley of Elah being the battlefield where David slew Goliath. His film is drier than the New Mexico desert, and as visually appealing as a gun store parking lot. Cinematographer Roger Deakins, who turned the muted browns of Barton Fink into an oppressive and seething vision of hell, here de-saturates the colors until the entire film resembles a faded file cabinet.

The solemnity is compounded by Haggis’ refusal to create any semblance of a moral dilemma. Deerfield is a good guy, the army is Goliath, and that’s that. Good morality tales have to make the darkness initially appealing, like Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island, by seducing the audience out of their comfort zone. They offer hard choices, and force confrontations with the serpentine reasoning of evil. Haggis offers no insight into the cover-up, expecting the audience’s distrust of the government to be reason enough. A more subversive tale would have followed the milquetoast soldier tasked with keeping this mess quiet. In The Valley Of Elah isn’t interested in subversion or commentary. It’s only showing what an anti-war moviegoer wants to see, and in doing so, does a tremendous disservice to both sides of the argument.

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This year has seen several movies dealing with the Iraq war and the continuing fallout, and without exception, they have each failed at the box office. A.O. Scott, for the New York Times, deftly touches on the reasons for that failure in an essay here.His best point is this:

But how do you end a movie about the war in Iraq or about the war on terror? Is it possible to picture victory — concretely, in visual and narrative detail? Is it possible to imagine defeat? To tell the difference? Where will we find the sweet relief or bitter catharsis we expect from movies?

We have been told from the start, by both the administration and its critics, that this will be a long, complicated, episodic fight. And so attempts to make sense of it piecemeal and in medias res, in discrete narratives with beginnings and ends, are likely to feel incomplete and unsatisfying.

It’s that idea that makes most of these Iraq-inflected films failures. The war is a nebulous stain on the national consciousness. It’s impossible to define because the boundaries are so hazy, and the reasons behind it so maddeningly opaque. Furthermore the current political dialogue treats the war like a Rorschach blot. One can either be for or against it, and the debate attempts to bluntly separate the population into one camp or another.

Film can be an excellent medium for exploring psychological complexities, but contemplating nuances takes time and distance. Given the time it takes to conceive, write, produce, shoot, edit, and release a film, it is a medium poorly suited to immediate analysis. It’s plausible, that with better direction, In The Valley Of Elah might have been a provocative film in 2004, when the freshness of the anti-war ideas would explore some explored terrain. United 93 sidestepped the issues by leaving the whys of the attack unexplored, and mythologizing them instead.

Television is a much more immediate medium, and far better suited to exploring the chaos of current events. 24, for example, can owe much of its popularity to the lingering sense of dread that the 9/11 attacks left. It has, in its own fantastic way, delved farther into the latent fears of an unwinnable war and the urge to see victory at all costs than any film will be able to do in the next decade.