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Rating: According to some, the best criticisms are those that come from within. After the racial prejudices of L.A. (Crash, 2005), Haggis tells us a gruesome story freely taken and then elaborated from real events. But be careful not to make a mistake: it is not a crime-thriller merely in search of truth. The tension and scary scenes, in fact, are absent. In the end, a murder case will come to light, but this is secondary because the film's intent is to address a burning issue (the Iraq war) by examining a man. Not just any man, but a retired ex-military man: a fabulous and expressive Tommy Lee Jones. Rigid, rigorous, and forged by a life devoted to the nation, he goes searching for his son who returned to the USA after 18 months in Iraq and has mysteriously disappeared.
Hank (this is the father's name) after a day of futile searches near the military base is informed that his son Mike has been found brutally murdered with 41 stab wounds, dismembered, burned, and fed to animals. Impassive, cold, and resolute, he faces the situation with disarming rationality. He can do this because he firmly believes in his ideals. He knows how to face the greatest pain, like the death of a son: a situation he lived through 10 years ago in an incident during a military simulation. Hank is someone who believes that the enemy must be faced with courage, without any fear, no matter how terrible it may appear. Just like David did in the valley of Elah against the fearsome Goliath.
The wife, (a secondary figure superbly played by Susan Sarandon), is instead destroyed by the pain of losing not one, but both of her sons in the military environment and lets go in a highly dramatic scene in which she curses her husband before regaining a minimal composure.
Returning to Hank. As we mentioned, he is not daunted by the cruel and savage killer of his son and his sole purpose is to find justice: he does not find time to succumb to the pain, but tries to piece together the puzzle of Mike's last hours as if it were the only way to give him an honorable death. But as already stated, the film is not a whodunit, so I don't think it is useful to spoil the plot. Suffice it to know that in his search for the truth, he finds the help of the beautiful Charlize Theron, who plays with great intensity (and with a band-aid on her nose for half the film) the role of a frustrated policewoman due to her work and the male chauvinist environment that surrounds her.
The film proceeds with a slow pace addressing themes such as racial prejudices, torture, drug and alcohol abuse that permeate the American military environment and when, slowly, the truth is glimpsed and takes form, the father begins to crumble because his foundations no longer exist. The problem is not so much that his son is dead: that he could accept as happened 10 years ago. The problem is that the value system on which he based his life has collapsed. That is why at the end of the film, the United States flag, which he has honored for a lifetime, feels it must be displayed upside down: a sign of international help request. David is afraid to fight Goliath.
An essential denouncement film, without excesses, which I did not find to be rhetorical in delivering a strong and clear message. It's up to you to grasp it by hurrying to watch this beautiful, not too long, well-acted and packaged film in the cinema.
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