We all know the story of David and Goliath. David was the brave messenger boy who used a tiny catapult to defeat a giant that no-one else dared fight.
The place where the fight occurred is probably less familiar. According to 1 Samuel 17:
Saul and the Israelites assembled and camped in the Valley of Elah and drew up their battle line to meet the Philistines.
The Philistines occupied one hill and the Israelites another, with the valley between them.”
Paul Haggis’ film of the same name – released in 2007, but which I’ve only just seen on dvd – takes us into a valley of the sort best evoked in another bible verse: the valley of the shadow of death. And leaves us there.
Though most of the film is played out in a grey, tumble-weed ridden Albuquerque in North America, every scene takes place under the shadow of the Iraq war. The radios are playing a war-mongering George Bush; the local police joke when an Iraq veteran’s wife comes in complaining he has drowned their dog. With an army base just outside town, post-traumatic stress disorder is no news at all.
On that level the film is a classic interrogation of war and its consequences; a natural descendant of The Deer Hunter, with its narrative of young recruits brutally shorn of innocence and coerced into acts of inhumanity. Though Elah is, if anything, even more despairing. The film suggests that the impact of legitimised violence, especially against civilians, is rarely less than catastrophic for the individual psyche.
Like The Deer Hunter, Elah is deeply concerned with the lives of the people left behind, and their inability to imagine the unimaginable scenes their loved ones must inhabit. Hank Deerfield, played by Tommy Lee Jones – who has surely never looked so worn nor so broken – fails to foresee the trials his son Mike will endure in Iraq, even though he is himself a Vietnam veteran.
So when Mike goes AWOL while on leave from the Middle East, Hank, an ex-military policeman, sets out to discover where he might be and what might have prompted his disappearance.
Both Jones and Charlize Theron – as a local police officer – give outstanding, self-effacing performances as two very different versions of the law. Both live their work; both are driven by a selfless sense of duty, an allegiance to something remote and intangible.
The other main players, the soldiers who clearly know more than they’re willing to say about Mike’s disappearance, offer a more extreme version of such discipline. Their loyalty is two-fold: to the American flag, but less consciously, to their own mental survival in impossible conditions, at any cost.
The film is based on true events: the disappearance of an American soldier named Richard T. Davis. And though on the surface, Elah is most obviously a police procedural – a genre film – replete with missed clues, a crotchety “detective” and a few red herring leads, it is also a very original piece of cinema which dares to tell a deeply unpalatable truth about soldiering and our reliance on it. When I wrote that the Dark Knight was so far the only film I’d seen to have dealt in some way with Iraq, Paul recommended In The Valley of Elah, saying it was one of the best films he’d seen tackling the effects of war. I would second that. Of course it’s not at all optimistic or fun to watch; rather, it inspires a kind of dread. But it’s worth remembering that the valley of Elah, where David fought Goliath, was only briefly a place of extraordinary courage. More commonly it played host to paralyzing, deeply human fear.
