Jones stands out in ‘Valley of Elah’

True events inspired the movie, which was directed by Paul Haggis.

By ROGER MOORE

ORLANDO SENTINEL

David met Goliath “in the Valley of Elah,” Hank Deerfield tells a boy in a bedtime story. Picked up five stones, loaded his “slingshot,” and killed him, Hank says.

Good defeated evil, the underdog triumphed, and it’s a true story, he says.

That’s the way Hank (Tommy Lee Jones) has looked at the world. His version of morality, his vision of manhood, uncomplicated by doubt or ambiguity. You fly the flag with respect and go into the military to do your duty to your country, maybe build character.

But Hank’s worldview is sorely tested “In the Valley of Elah.” His worry, guilt and sense of obligation send this retired military policeman to the base where his Army son has gone AWOL. What he finds there, and doesn’t find, shakes him to his conservative, rural-values core.

Because his son is first missing, then dead — a gruesome murder. The Army (in the person of Jason Patric) isn’t inclined to tell him all it knows. He has to shame an under-qualified civilian cop (Charlize Theron) into challenging jurisdiction and second-guessing what the military is doing. The military, he knows, doesn’t like to be second-guessed. He’s used that “If you’d ever been in the Army” put-down himself. It cuts off an awful lot of debate, both in the movie and in American life.

And as he digs, using his MP’s instincts, what he knows about his son and what he knows that he is sure the Army and the cops don’t know, Hank Deerfield comes to understand what sending very young men into a civil war can do to them.

Making it believable

“In the Valley of Elah” is another in a long line of great Tommy Lee Jones performances. Watch the way he lives in this man. Jones, a child of wealth and a Yale man, carries himself ex-Army ramrod straight, crawls under a truck and spins the top off a Jim Beam bottle as if it’s something he does every day. His Hank is a model of pent-up, contained, intelligent impatience. That impatience, we know, is going to boil over.

This R-rated film, “inspired by true events,” was written and directed by Paul Haggis of “Crash,” and is another of his searching, soulful explorations of the national psyche. It’s an Iraq-vets-back-home story shaped into an Iraq War metaphor. It’s a more streamlined film than “Crash,” a cleaner, leaner story than “Million Dollar Baby,” which Haggis scripted.

He has found a great thriller device: cell-phone video from Iraq that was on Hank’s son’s phone. The video is choppy, distorted and revealing, and Hank only sees a bit of it at a time.

Haggis misses the chance to connect Hank’s Vietnam experience to what his son might have gone through in Iraq.

This is Jones’ movie, a quiet performance of weight and impact. Hank is the character who takes the emotional journey, who plunges into his own Valley of Elah and discovers that life and war are a lot messier than a parable from the Bible.