Editor Reviews:

Description:
Mike Deerfield returns to the U.S. after his tour of duty in Iraq and abruptly goes missing. His father Hank, a spit-and-polish ex-MP from the Vietnam era, goes looking for him. What he finds goes to the heart of American combat experiences in the Iraqi conflict. Academy Award®-winning* Crash filmmaker Paul Haggis teams with Oscar®- winning* actors Tommy Lee Jones, Charlize Theron and Susan Sarandon in a probing, powerful, fact-based look at fathers and sons…and at a nation and the young soldiers it sends into battle. Jones plays Hank, whose quest lays bare a tangled web of cover-up, murder, mystery and profound revelation about the personal costs of war.

Amazon.com:
In career Army officer Hank Deerfield's worldview, the American military exists to bring order to the world, and honor and dignity to every one of its soldiers. As played by Tommy Lee Jones, in a layered performance that will haunt the viewer long after the film is over, Deerfield wears the Army life like he does his standard-issue white T-shirts--unconsciously making a cheap motel bed with crisp inspection-ready corners. Yet if war is hell, the purgatory for the relatives of damaged soldiers can cause far more anguish, and Paul Haggis' quietly devastating In the Valley of Elah tells this story through Deerfield, who is desperately trying to piece together the fate of his adored son Mike, a soldier in Iraq.

Mike's company has returned from duty, but he is missing; Hank flies from Tennessee to Fort Rudd in the Southwest, to conduct his own investigation into the disappearance. There he meets a smart but put-upon police officer (Charlize Theron, glammed-down but still showing a bit too much sexy collarbone for a cop) who also smells something off in the Army's official story of the disappearance. The two form an unlikely team, but as a friend tells Deerfield early on, "You gotta trust somebody sometime, Hank," and Mike's vanishing is Hank's tipping point.

As Hank pieces together the horrifying story of Mike's fate, the incremental pain becomes etched in Jones' ragged features, and the camera captures all of it--far more powerfully than could a million words of reportage from the front lines. Theron's performance is also strong, and Susan Sarandon is moving if underutilized as Hank's grief-stricken wife, robbed of the simple nuclear family life she so wanted. "They shouldn't send heroes to places like Iraq," says one of Mike's buddies late in the film, and it's the viewers' collective sorrow--and the film's great achievement--to feel that at the deepest human level. --A.T. Hurley

Rating : - Dehumanizing effect of the Iraq war
War is always ugly. It does not matter where it is fought or by whom. Soldiers are active participants in surival games that require them to kill with or without reason in order to preserve their won life or the lives of the people around them. This story is a story of the current generation of young people going to Iraq. They are used to video cameras, simple comforts of every day life, while long stays in a third world country like Iraq are having lasting effects on their psyche. Tommy Lee Jones plays a father whose sons goes AWOL. He is convinced that if his son is missing, there must be a valid reason and decides to launch his own investigation. When a body was found just outside of the city and identified as remains of his son, he is determined to find a person that committed the crime. Local police and military police fight over jurisdiction and the right to investigate the crime. Is it that military wants to keep this hush-hush, or that the local police does not want another murder on their worksheet? Caught in the battle are the grief stricken father and a female police officer, herself a victim of endless sexist torture at the workplace. What is mesmerizing is the way that a young man was killed (over 40 stab wounds with the knife, body cut up in pieces and burned). Even more troubling is the discovery that it was his military buddies who did it. What sort of experience do these young men go through to be able to kill in the most gruesome way one of their own? Are they sociopaths enabled even more by their participation in a war where killing is a part of the daily life, or just irrevocably damaged goods with no shred of consience left? Tommy Lee Jones is so good in this role. This film will make one think abour consequences of war and its affect on people for a long time. It redefines humanity and what it means to different people.