In the Valley of Elah

Tommy Lee Jones provides the moral heft to this mystery, writes Donald Clarke .

IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH

Directed by Paul Haggis. Starring Tommy Lee Jones, Susan Sarandon, Charlize Theron, James Franco, Josh Brolin, Jason Patric, Frances Fisher, Victor Wolf 15A cert, gen release, 121 min

****

It's asking a lot of any face that it should, by twitch and inclination alone, get across one of the most depressing quandaries of middle age: has the universe just got that bit more cruel, or were men and women always so appalling?

Has society really changed for the worse, or am I only now noticing the ancient filth that forever fouled human relations?

Still, if any face could communicate that unhappy dilemma, it would be the one attached to Tommy Lee Jones. Only a week after he decided that 1980s Texas was no country for old men, Jones, once again, climbs aboard the handcart that's taking us all to hell.

Paul Haggis's follow-up to the overwrought Crash features TLJ as a retired military policeman who, appalled at the authorities' inertia, sets out to investigate the circumstances surrounding his son's death.

The young man, recently returned from service in Iraq, was found burnt and butchered some short distance from his base. As the film progresses, Jones begins to suspect that the decline in military morale and the dehumanising effect of combat may have played a part in the murder.

Meanwhile, a sympathetic police officer (the convincingly exhausted Charlize Theron) battles against the misogynistic attitudes of her colleagues.

In the Valley of Elah is more conventionally melodramatic than the Coens' film (the cheesy final shot would be unworthy of Joel Schumacher) but, thanks partly to the complex work done by that face, it remains gripping and moving throughout. Haggis never forgets that, for all his diligent research and high intentions, his first job, as the writer and director of a thriller, is to tease the audience's expectations.

What we end up with is a worthy successor to such socially alert thrillers as In the Heat of the Night and Missing .

As in the latter, the anger of the protagonist - at the top brass's incompetence; at the soldiers' amorality - is coupled with pungent disillusionment because, to this point, the hard-working war hero had regarded himself as a pillar of the establishment.

Not everything works here. The diagnosis of America's current malaise is a bit simplistic, and the compulsion to tie up every loose end deprives the film of some natural energy. This is, however, very much a story worth attending to.

© 2008 The Irish Times