'Valley' low

(C+) In the Valley of Elah is too inept and diffuse to be a howl against the war in Iraq. At best, it is a manly whimper.

Written and directed with a two-by-four by that proponent of earnest overstatement Paul Haggis (Crash), it stars Tommy Lee Jones as a former military policeman who retunes his old cop reflexes when his son, back from Iraq, is hideously murdered. Charlize Theron plays the small-town police detective who helps him crack the case after he convinces her that the crime took place on public, not military, grounds.

These two would be great together in another movie. Jones embodies old-school machismo with power and nobility. In this ex-soldier's tradition, masculine strength centers on responsibility as well as aggressive action. You see it in the way he respects and protects his wife (Susan Sarandon).

He should be the perfect partner for Theron, a single mother and dedicated investigator. Her character tries (and fails) to de-beautify herself enough to squelch the talk that she used her sexuality to rise from traffic cop. And as she proved in her underrated turn in North Country, no one plays a pretty woman's mortification and resolve better than Theron. Her limpidity (like Naomi Watts') is one of the gifts that keep on giving to contemporary audiences.

She and Jones are always on the brink of making tough, beautiful music together. His expertise rattles her, but his underlying confidence and virtue settle her. They even conjure a light, sardonic moment or two. He tries to read The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to her little boy, finds himself unable to make heads or tails or manes of it, and instead relates the tale of David defeating Goliath in the valley of Elah.

Too bad writer-director Haggis dribbles suspense in with an eyedropper, assembles a vat-full of astoundingly colorless red herrings, and uses the David-vs.-Goliath reference for hazy metaphors about courage and self-reliance. Even a cheap-jack melodrama should keep faith with the audience, but the high-toned Haggis betrays viewers' trust at every turn. The eye-opening video files recovered from the dead son's cell phone, the gradual unveiling of tours of duty that dehumanize Americans and ravage Iraqis, are presented in a coy, fragmented, sidelong way that shuts down discussion instead of provoking it.

The forensic mysteries wouldn't pass muster on CSI: Baghdad. And while the narrative tension evaporates, every little sociological detail clicks too neatly into place, from Jones' own exploded racial prejudices to the use of an upside-down Old Glory to signal international distress.

No Vietnam-era film, including Hearts and Minds with its silly equations of football and conquest, ever depicted the armed services as monolithically as Haggis does here. He sets up the film as a tribute to military virtue only to depict today's Army as an inevitable corrupter and destroyer of youth.

Jones is playing an ultimately unplayable character: the last of the just. When he glances at a fresh, acne-ridden boy getting ready to take his son's place, he's like a grizzled version of Holden Caulfield's catcher in the rye, trying to save children from fakery and despoilment. But Caulfield would have been the first to spot this movie as a phony.

Related topic galleries: Charlize Theron, Armed Forces, Susan Sarandon, Defense, Tommy Lee Jones

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