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Rating: Long ago in the valley of Elah in Palestine, a boy armed with a sling was sent by his king to fight the giant Goliath. We all know how it went, David won because he could master his fear by hitting the monster as it approached with great strides.
These are the rock-solid certainties of the now-retired former Marine sergeant, Hank Deerfield, and these are the same that he sought to pass on to his two sons, whom he wanted to be military as well. But the eldest died ten years earlier, falling with his helicopter, and Max, the youngest, has just disappeared from the military camp in New Mexico after returning with his unit from Iraq.
Hank goes to look for him and during the car journey, he stops in front of a school to straighten a stars and stripes flag placed upside down by a Salvadoran janitor. On-site, he learns the bitter truth: Max was dismembered and then burned before being thrown into a wasteland, and Hank, in his grief, demands that full light be shed but clashes with the incompetence and indifference of the police and the reticence of the military. It is up to him to investigate helped by a tough but sensitive local police detective, with his certainties gradually undermined by what he discovers, the ugliness of a war even dirtier than the one he fought in Vietnam, capable of upsetting the mental balance of the young soldiers immersed in a devastating reality.
There are false leads and prejudices to overcome, including his own, hindering the search for truth and in the end he understands that it wasn't right for that boy to have to face the giant to prove he wasn't afraid. On his way home, he passes by that flag again and this time raises it upside down.
It is the second film by Paul Haggis, already an excellent screenwriter, after "Crash," and there's no comparison between the fragmentation and redundancy of the latter faced with the rigorous sparseness of "In the Valley of Elah." Haggis this time performs a diametrically opposite operation taking refuge in an atmosphere with dull colors that envelops the drama of a man not used to living with uncertainties and instead this time he is called to face the doubt of what is right and what is not. But above all, with the awareness that this distinction loses importance in an absurd reality like war.
In the role of Hank once again Tommy Lee Jones's thousand facial wrinkles act extraordinarily well, while the detective Emily is portrayed with great sensitivity by Charlize Theron, who in the second half of the film acts with a bandage on her nose, just like Jack Nicholson/Jake Gittes in Polanski's "Chinatown."
My advice is to hurry before it is taken off the screens to make room for Christmas blockbusters.
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