Wiggly Socks Movie Reviews

By Linda Winsh-Bolard

Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones) is Vietnam MP veteran, now hauling gravel, whose two sons also joined the service. That is what the family was all about: work, service and good family life.

His second son Mike (Jonathan Trucker) returns from Iraq to Fort Rudd, Albuquerque, N.M. but goes AWOL within days.

This does not sound right to Hank or his wife Joan (Susan Sarandon), and Hank goes to investigate what happened. He is shown hacked and burned pieces of Mike’s body. The murder only adds to his resolve to find out what has really happened and why did it happened. Hank gets hold of Mike’s scorched cell phone where he finds disturbing images. Using his instincts, common sense and old training he follows the trail of silence and deceit.

His competitive aide is the only female police detective in the department, Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron), stuck in misogynist male environment and mocked despite her abilities.

Slowly and against the tide represented by both, the civilian police and the MP, Deerfield and Sanders learn the events of the evening of Mike’s death.

Those events, senseless and brutal as they are, seem to be a logical consequence of what are people taught to do when they fight current wars.
In a sense, they are also logical extension of the growing brutality within the society itself, compounded by growing indifference of both, citizens and the police who once were here to protect. This indifference shown in a character of a young woman who tries to report her abusive partner, fails to find any protection, and dies few days later. Justice doesn’t come into it.

It is unusually delicately woven vision of where we live, how we live and to what we have become accustomed to. The trail Hank follows, the people and their lives, are an etching of our daily care-or lack of it.

The growing tension is not build on any visible effort, character development uses none of the tricks known to Hollywood, these are ordinary people in ordinary circumstances without any political agenda, sexual innuendo or tearful sentimentality. The curiosity and tension builds on seamless combination of acting and directing.

Dividing Hank and Joan Deerfield, both equally convincing realistic, unsentimental people portrayed by excellent Susan Sarandon and Tommy Lee Jones, neither of whom seems to be acting, they just let their characters be, and the young soldiers is not a schism of generation or work experience, it is a vast schism of morals and ethics that are as foreign to the young as they were inbred into the old.
The explanation of this schism lays with the mid-generation, in this case the civilian and MP police, who are more into politics serving their careers then policing, as are many in real life.
Charlize Theron’s multifaceted mother-detective - woman alone in small town is nearly as good as Sarandon’s but not quite. The rest of the cast, while in supporting roles, does justice to the fact that no one in this film is a single dimension person.

If we have ever gained any progress as humans living together, we are losing it fast while becoming the relicts of brutal, selfish and at the end self-destructive past.

Unusually we can also see the now accomplished cooperation between the aggressors: the police protect the aggressors because they are kindred spirits. The victims, dead or the mourning, are of no interest to them having proved by their victimization that they matter nothing to anybody. It is the aggressors who will protect the ruling class against any and all interference. This trend is so prevalent in our society that nobody even questions the consequences.

Haggis wisely offers no solutions, he lets Hank to question his own beliefs and expect all of us to do the same.

In this Valley of Elah David might lose to Goliath.

Directed and written by Paul Haggis based partly on true Playboy story “Death and Dishonor” by Mark Boal, camera : Roger Deakins, Music: Mark Isham

A Warner Independent Pictures release presented in association with Nala Films, Summit Entertainment, Samuels Media, of a Blackfriar's Bridge production. Produced by Patrick Wachsberger, Steven Samuels, Darlene Caamano Loquet, Paul Haggis, Laurence Becsey. Executive producers, Stan Wlodkowski, David Garrett, Erik Feig, James Holt, Emilio Diez Barroso, Bob Hayward. Co-producers, Dana Maksimovich, Deborah Rennard.

Hank Deerfield - Tommy Lee Jones
Det. Emily Sanders - Charlize Theron
Lt. Kirklander - Jason Patric
Joan Deerfield - Susan Sarandon
Sgt. Dan Carnelli - James Franco
Arnold Bickman - Barry Corbin
Chief Buchwald - Josh Brolin
Evie - Frances Fisher
Cpl. Steve Penning - Wes Chatham
Spc. Gordon Bonner - Jake McLaughlin