In The Valley of Elah: A

In its searing, straight-faced melancholia, its audacious probing austerity, In the Valley of Elah will ravage and destroy the viewer in a way no other post-Iraq War film has. It's structured as a murder mystery -- and it's filmed, with help from cinematographer Roger Deakins, as the most sparely devastating of piquant true-crimes -- that revolves around one man's (Tommy Lee Jones) search for his son (Jonathan Tucker), and what happened to him once he returned from serving a tour of duty in Iraq. The man is Hank Deerfield, a Vietnam vet who gets a call one day from an army base in Texas that his son has gone AWOL. Hank, though, is unconvinced -- or at the very least, confused. And so he drives down himself to take a look. And when the military police and the sheriff's department come across the charred remains of his son's, Mike Deerfield, body, Hank decides to stay on in Texas long enough to find out how his boy came to be in many pieces in a dusty field by a dark road.

That's how the movie unravels; Hank, with help from a local detective (Charlize Theron), pieces together what he can from all available sources. This includes the military at the local base, who all but openly stonewall him at all possible points, and his son's cell phone (which he cleverly steals in one of the more telling scenes of Hank's canny character). The phone itself has been all but destroyed, but he gets a local tech wiz to pull of a few of the remaining videos his son shot while on duty -- it turns out Mike was both a rabid amatuer videographer and photographer of his experiences -- and the pieces of viral data themselves have a herky-jerky, lurid fascination. They're glimpses for the audience into a place that comes to represent, more and more as Hank realizes the truth of his son's murder, the great void of our generation: the place where young men go to die -- or lose themselves.

Paul Haggis has written and directed In the Valley of Elah, and it's a curious move for him. This is the same man, after all, who built up a commercial reputation over the last two decades as a television writer, and then burst on the scene creatively with 2005's Crash -- which was itself a mixture of quaint, hour-long narrative structuring and scathing dialogue. Crash doesn't hold up on subsequent viewings, its talky-niceties are too obvious (and thereby foolishly painful) to any viewer who can see past the clever veil of Haggis' explorative script. But Elah doesn't fall into the same category as his Best Picture winner; more aptly its belongs with Letters from Iwo Jima, Casino Royale, and Million Dollar Baby -- a trio of films he's helped write that far more capably demonstrate the strengths of a balanced, talented auteur. In fact, seeing him take the directing reigns again for the first time since Crash, the audience may at first be taken aback at Elah's tone; it's reticent like nothing the writer-director has done before. But that same stoney quality masks chasms of pain, and Haggis, with Tommy Lee Jones as his star and Atlas (since without Jones, the picture may itself have fallen and rolled away into oblivion), investiages these in a way that leaves equally deep chasms in the audience.

As agents of, and against the mystery, the ensemble is surprisingly well fielded. Jones gives one of the best performances of his very long career, and Theron (no longer wearing ugly-up or playing a universal Woman) is so natural she counter-points her older co-star perfectly. As the soldiers who served with Mike, Jake McLaughlin, Jason Patric, and others are so curiously straight-laced its almost laughable, until their facades are stripped bare, and the audience's laughter curdles into shock.

The mystery takes two hours to solve, and somewhere in there the movie sags against its own sparse style, and one grows antsy. But the last twenty-or-so minutes are some of the most singularly biting I've seen in quite a long while. Maybe ever. The denoument of Elah is intrinsic to the titular story and underlying metaphor: David and Goliath, two combatants both brave and blinded. In Haggis narrative scheme, the focus keeps shifting: who is David -- The soldiers we've so happily sent away? The enemy they face, so happy to fire back? -- and who is Goliath -- America, the country? Or America, the people? And each new interrogative sticks deeper, draws more inquistive blood to the surface. Sure, standing 100 yards away a person could point and declare all of In the Valley of Elah a "stunt," (there's irony to a liberal like Haggis writing from the perspective of a conservative like Hank) but if that same person were to walk closer, look closer, they'd be stunned into silence. And that final image, at once obvious and daring? It won't just silence you, it'll bring you to tears.