In the Valley of Elah was a pleasant surprise in that it didn’t completely suck. We all saw the combination of an Iraq War film and Paul Haggis and thought it would be terrible. Instead it was merely bad with a couple of surprisingly good elements.

The film follows Tommy Lee Jones’s Hank Deerfield as he searches for his son, who has gone missing shortly after returning from Iraq. The local police are happy to pass the case to the military police, who are in turn happy to bury it. There is, naturally, an underdog (and female!) local cop who wants to help Hank despite pressures from her department, played by Charlize Theron. The search for Hank’s son is the stuff of Law and Order: dramatic, compelling, and twisty but contrived and unoriginal. You want to find out what happens but you’d rather skip to the end than sit through the journey. The suspects include the son’s fellow soldiers from his tour in Iraq and it’s from this angle we get a lot of Iraq war preaching.

This is the type of war drama/murder mystery where Hank finds his son’s cell phone and a mysterious tech guru only sends him one video recovered from it per day. Each video, conveniently, reveals slightly more than the last. It’s also the type of mystery where the camera lingers obviously over a case-breaking clue that isn’t discovered until a climactic ending and where innocent people act as if they have something to hide when they don’t for no apparent reason. Hank may be deep into the mystery of his lost son but that doesn’t prevent him from telling his wife not to open a package sent from Iraq, in order to “protect” her.

Jones got nominated for Best Actor for this role. It’s a quintessential Jones role: reserved, sharp cop. In that sense I don’t think it was a stretch for him and I liked him better in a similar role in No Country for Old Men. Of course, he gets these parts because he’s damn good at them and he’s good here. I like characters that don’t show a lot of obvious emotion but still manage to articulate so much with small looks and expressions. (For another great 2007 example, check out Ulrich Mühe in The Lives of Others.) In a film that doesn’t understand the meaning of understatement, Jones imparts a lot of emotion very subtly. There are probably performances I would have chosen over Jones, like Ryan Gosling in Lars and the Real Girl, but it was no means a bad choice.

In the Valley of Elah isn’t exactly subtle. Soldiers talk of their experiences in a stilted, affected manner like they’re oh-so-troubled actors. We’re treated to some strangely situated and heavy-handed screeds about the evils of war. I guess this is sort of expected from a Haggis screenplay and there is no clever or original insight into the wartime experience.

But just when it looks like the film will play out in an obvious manner there comes some surprisingly well-crafted touches. The first comes when Hank tells Theron’s character’s son the story of David and Goliath. The two square off in the valley of Elah, hence the film’s title. Hank puts a lot of emotion into the story… for Hank, which means it’s only slightly less monotone than normal. But it’s enough to see how deeply he holds his religious convictions and how they influence his life in a casual way. He’s certainly not proselytizing; he lays out the story because it’s an important and practical lesson for the boy but it also reveals the strength and determination in a man who expresses very, very little. The David and Goliath analogy isn’t exactly a revelation, but the scene goes a long way into explaining Hank’s motivations.

I absolutely loved the ending. Through the first 80% of the film I expected exactly what I expected before turning it on: there was some sort of horrible war crime that occurred in Iraq and Hank’s son was killed to cover it up. And yet that’s now how it plays out. Indeed the son was killed by his army compatriots, but it was an utterly senseless killing. There was a drunken argument, one man started stabbing before he understood what was going on, they covered up the crime, and ate some fried chicken. There was no conspiracy, just a meaningless taking of life that even the perpetrator couldn’t explain. To me, this was the perfect resolution: messy, cold, unnecessary, pointless, and unsatisfying. It went a long way to making up for an entire film’s worth of preaching and obviousness.

But the man who brought us Crash couldn’t leave us on this devastating and understated note. Instead he gives us a final shot that’s so way over-the-top that not only did I see it from a mile away but I literally begged him under my breath not to go there. It hearkens back to an earlier scene that itself was absurd and heavy-handed, but at least that scene’s point is made as the film progresses. But that muted statement is undone by an action that’s completely out of character for Hank and beats us over the head with unnecessary meaning. Sigh.

Overall it’s a film that had some good overarching themes and ideas but actually watching it is a chore of witnessing scene after scene hitting with a thud and without an ounce of finesse.