Freedom Socialist • Vol. 28, No. 6 • December 2007-January 2008

MOVIE REVIEW

Valley of Elah asks filmgoers to confront Iraq war atrocities

by Emily Woo Yamasaki

A day of reckoning for two military men. Credit: Warner Brothers

Documentaries critical of the Iraq war have been coming out for some time now, most of them made by independent filmmakers. But now Hollywood is getting into the act with a number of dramas newly released or coming soon.

One of the first is In the Valley of Elah, from Crash director Paul Haggis. Elah and films like it are meaningful because they challenge moviegoers to face the gruesome effects of the Iraq war on U.S. soldiers and their loved ones, as well as on the Iraqi people.

Tommy Lee Jones deftly plays Elah's main character of Hank Deerfield, a Vietnam vet retired from the military police. He shows us a devoted ex-military man forced to confront what is going on in Iraq while investigating the disappearance of his son, who has just returned from serving there.

But as Elah's closing credits started to roll, what nagged at me was the sense from the film that the atrocities of the Iraq war are unprecedented. Does writer and director Haggis really think that U.S. foreign policy has gone bad solely because of the invasion of Iraq?

Alert: plot spoilers in this section. The drama is based on the true story of Specialist Richard Davis, who was killed by four fellow GIs at Fort Benning in 2003. The soldiers stabbed Davis to death, setting his body on fire and leaving it in the woods just days after their return from Iraq. Police said the four killed Davis after an altercation at a strip club.

The real-life father of Richard Davis, Lanny Davis, a retired Army staff sergeant, sparked an investigation when his son was assumed to be AWOL. After seeing Elah, he said, "I've been thinking about flying my own flag upside down. This isn't my America, the one I stood up for."

Hank, the Lanny Davis character in the film, likewise gives the impression that his own war experiences give him no basis for imagining the brutal crimes being committed by U.S. soldiers in Iraq. But really the Iraq war phrase "shock and awe" fits equally for the war that produced the "search and destroy" My Lai massacre in Vietnam.

The power of the film lies in the evolution of Hank's character, which shows in the creased face of actor Jones. "In the Valley of Elah" refers to the biblical place where David slew the giant Goliath. In challenging the military goliath, Hank discovers monstrous truths about the Iraq war and the soldiers fighting it, including his son Mike. He goes from being a loyal Army officer to a grief-stricken father who has lost both his last child and his faith in the country he believed in.

Hank is further tormented by realizing his own role in Mike's unthinkable metamorphosis. After Mike arrives in Iraq, he is involved in the killing of an Iraqi child. In flashbacks, we see the confused and upset young soldier call Hank from a barracks phone to tell him something is wrong. Before the story can emerge, his father dismissively responds, "That's just nerves, son."

Later, through clips of cell phone videos, Hank learns that his son Mike and his buddies turned into torturers and murderers of Iraqis.

The powerlessness of Army wives is poignantly rendered in the subplot of a woman who is dismissed by local cops when reporting the killing of her dog by her husband, and then ends up a fatality of domestic violence herself. In one of the film's most moving scenes, it is also depicted in the reaction of Hank's wife, played by Susan Sarandon, to Mike's death. The couple has already lost their older son to the military several years earlier. Sarandon's character tells Hank that Mike, growing up under his father's influence, "couldn't have felt like a man" without joining the military. "You could have left me one son."

But Haggis's main female character is no victim. Finely portrayed by Charlize Theron, Detective Emily Sanders helps Hank in defiance of the misogynist belittling of the male cops she works with.

Celluloid illumination. Another note sounded in the film is the lack of options for youth of color, which comes through via the character of Ortiz, a Chicano soldier. Ortiz tells Hank that he hated it in Iraq - but that once he got home, all he wanted to do was go back. By this point, though, the audience knows that this is a "choice" with dreadful consequences.

Elah sends an important message to young men and women who need to think through for themselves what it means to join the military. In an age of censored and sanitized news, it makes graphic the human cost of the Iraq war, right through to the post-combat traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that afflicts so many veterans.

Most people already agree with Haggis that war - or at least the Iraq war - is hell. But for anyone living in a self-protective, self-absorbed bubble of denial, Elah could be a wake-up call.

Hopefully, some of the films dealing with the "war on terror" that follow Elah, including Brian DePalma's Redacted, will treat more deeply of questions like the cause of U.S. aggression - and by doing so, fuel the fight against it.

NYC Radical Women Organizer Emily Woo Yamasaki, who has acted in film and on stage, invites feedback at nycradicalwomen@nyct.net.