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In the Valley of Elah, it is a new movie written and directed by Paul Haggis, who won an Oscar for his screenplay for comedy with Million Dollar Baby and also for best picture for Crash a couple of years ago. This movie is both very stripdown and linear and also very ambitious, it's telling in someways a very simple story, a kind of police procedural/murder mystery. But it also wants to say a lot about the state of American families and the American sore in light of the Iraq war. This is part of a vivid pictures dealing with Iraq that are starting to try to take account of the effect of the attack on this country and its citizens.

Tommy Lee Jones plays a retired military police officer. He lives in Tennessee with his wife, played by Susan Sarandon, one night he gets a call, saying that his son who has just returned from a troop duty in Iraq, has gone a war from his base in Mexico.

The father goes to find his boy and discovers that he’s been killed, brutally stabbed, chopped into pieces and set on fire in the middle of the desert. So with the help of a local police detective played by Charles Theron, Tommy Lee Jones’s character tries to figure out what happened to his son.

But really the essential point I think that Haggis is trying to make is the mystery is never solved. There are things that happen to soldiers in Iraq, things that have done to them, things that they do to Iraq and each other, that are beyond the can, beyond the reach of people back home.

What this movie is really about is the gulf that existed between the people who are over there, fighting, and people who are back home, trying to figure out what we think of that war and the people fighting it.

It’s not a perfect movie. It has a lot of melodramatic touches. They are a few too many subplots that seem to wander off the dew web. But Tommy Lee Jones is such an authoritative understated actor it’s really a pleasure to watch him. You feel like he’s really deep inside the character. He understands everything that how this man thinks and behaves and acts. His blunderbuss and also his deep insides. Whether the movie ultimatley has anything new or profound, say, a better act, doesn’t least represent in honors. And I think a noble attempt by a very talented and thoughtful and smart filmmaker to take some account of it.