Venice Film Festival 2007 diary part two

Dave Calhoun reports on 'In The Valley of Elah', the new film written and directed by the Oscars' favourite son, Paul Haggis

Paul Haggis is a busy man: his scripts for 'Crash', which he also directed, and 'Million Dollar Baby', directed by Clint Eastwood, picked up Best Picture Oscars two years in row in 2005 and 2006, and he was also one of the writers of the recent Bond movie, 'Casino Royale'. The Canadian's next effort as a writer-director is 'In The Valley of Elah', which screened a the Venice Film Festival this weekend, with Tommy Lee Jones in the lead role as no-nonsense patriot Hank Deerfield, an ex-serviceman in Tennessee who is trying to deal with the mysterious circumstances surrounding the brutal murder of his son, also a serviceman, soon after his return from duty in Iraq.

It's the second American film to screen at Venice in which the Iraq War is very much in the foreground of the drama, only this is a significantly more mature, accomplished work than 'Redacted', Brian de Palma's sloppy faux documentary. It's a film that may also surprise the many critics of 'Crash' - including this one - who found Haggis' earlier, award-winning film to be hysterical and unfocused. What's interesting about 'In the Valley of Elah' as a film about the US military in Iraq - an emerging mini-genre in itself - is that it takes place almost exclusively in Tennessee in the days after the vicious killing and burning of young solider, Mike Deerfield, at the side of an out-of-town road one Saturday night. There are a few, brief flashbacks to scenes of the war in Iraq delivered via mobile phone technology (this, too, is becoming a trope of these movies), but otherwise we are left to imagine the experiences of Deerfield and his fellow soldiers through their later, often reluctant testimony and, most successfully, from our own inferences from their erratic and violent behaviour after returning from the battlefield.

It's Jones' film: his performance will surely see him nominated for an Oscar. As Hank, Jones is unsatisfied with the poor explanations offered to him after his son's death by both the local and military police and so he becomes involved in the investigation himself. He finds an ally in a local detective played by Charlize Theron, who herself is suffering from the macho chauvinism of her colleagues. Jones' performance is committed and clever, leaving his character's wife, played by Susan Sarandon, in the shade and, a little disturbingly, very much on the sidelines of the movie.

If much of the film is given over to certain standards of the genre of thrillers about murder investigations – such as a focused, engaged andemotionally driven victim driving ahead a slap-dash police investigationthrough his own strong-will – Haggis compensates with an impression of what war is actually like for American men serving in Iraq. He delivers this with a sly narrative intelligence and doesn't pull any punches in portraying certain US soldiers as much as ignorant and abusive as psychologicallydamaged by war. There are some broad moments, there is some unexplained imagery (such as the title, which refers to the story of David and Goliath and which Jones recounts as a pointed bedtime story for Theron's young child), and there are some extraneous plot elements, but Haggis' film is largely a solid and effective addition to the spate of films about Iraq emerging from America.