That Paul Haggis (call him London, Ontario’s favourite son) is a veritable Oscar machine. He crested the horizon for a Best Picture win for Million Dollar Baby, then one for Crash, which he wrote/directed, then a screenwriting nom for Letters From Iwo Jima, and now his latest, In the Valley of Elah, should be good for bagging a coupla big ones. Consider a scene early in the film, in which Tommy Lee Jones, a bereaved father, tells a runty kid, whose single mom is Charlize Theron, the story of David and Goliath. The Bible says the fight supposedly takes place in the valley of Elah. You can almost hear that Best Pic trophy factory working overtime.

Don’t mistake this seasonal cynicism for a dislike of this film, by the way, because it is fantastic. You’ve probably already heard about Tommy Lee Jones’s performance. He plays a dad whose son, just after returning home from a tour in Iraq, goes AWOL, so he drives downstate to the army base looking for him. Theron, the beat cop, gets the drab brown and the middle part of her hair just right. Each minor character, from Susan Sarandon’s bereaved mom to Jason Patric’s army cop, is a perfectly measured ingredient in what is bound to be a rousing success on the awards circuit.

Jones, it must be said, is phenomenal. He’s an ex-Vietnam officer, now gravel hauler upstate, who, from his modest room at a cheap motel, mounts his investigation by dogging local investigators who are coming to too many easy conclusions about what really
happened to his son. So he pokes around, dowsing for truth, with the wrinkles that line his nose and eye sockets getting more profound.

Another thing that’s impressive about Paul Haggis is that his movies are never the same, though he does seem to have a fondness for exploring platonic friendships between older men and younger women (Charlize and Tommy have nothing on Clint and Hilary in Million Dollar Baby). He is L.A. by choice and Ontarian by birth, so it’s also amusing that he wins the most awards for films that examine everyday lives through a prism of a magnified American-ness. Crash was a movie for Angelenos, and In the Valley of Elah culminates in a very overwrought scene involving a tattered flag blowin’ in the wind.

Source: hour.ca