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| Quiet
desperation: Theron and Jones in Valley. |
A
Quiet Storm
By Laura Leon
In
the Valley of Elah
Directed
by Paul Haggis
Who would have thought that the single most powerful moment
in cinema this year involves a piece of toilet paper? In Paul
Haggis’ stunning drama In the Valley of Elah, a retired
military policeman, Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones), sets
off to a New Mexico barracks, from where his son Mike, just
back from Iraq, has gone missing. Deerfield is gruff, a man
of few words whose military background is evident in the way
he makes his hotel bed and attempts, sans iron, to maintain
the crease in his pant legs. Frustrated at the apparent lack
of interest in his son’s case from either the Army or the
local police department, he strides into a garish and depressing
series of topless bars and gun shops, searching for clues.
A nick from shaving—a rare sign of nerves—begins to spew blood,
just as an Army representative, ominous in full dress, appears
at his door. Hank retires to the bathroom to stanch the flow
of blood, knowing just what his visitor has come to inform
him of, and in these few seconds, the precision with which
Deerfield tears a piece of toilet paper—just the right size
to cover his cut—reveals his heroic attempt to keep calm,
even sane, in the brief time that remains before hearing those
dreaded words, before having to accept devastating loss.
In
the Garden of Elah is full of powerful moments, but not
the kind involving big bangs or histrionics. Hank’s reserve
and stoicism dominate the screen, reflecting an increasingly
boundless sense of horror and loss. As he wends his way through
the twists and turns of his son’s final hours, desperately
trying to find out not just “who done it,” but why, he becomes
more and more aware that the world he’s living in is vastly
different from anything he’s encountered or experienced before,
including, presumably, Vietnam. Haggis (Crash) borrows
a little from movies like The Conversation, in the
way that information is forthcoming not as a whole piece,
but in dribs and drabs. Hank pores over a smattering of images
and sounds recovered from Mike’s damaged camera phone, searching
for anything that will shed a light, but the images signify
nothing that is recognizable to even his experienced eyes.
Throughout, shards of news about Iraq are quietly omnipresent,
as CNN and Fox play innocuously in the backgrounds of diners
and waiting rooms.
Hank’s quest for the truth is shared by Detective Emily Sanders
(Charlize Theron), a single mother aching to prove her mettle
on the force. Theron is magnificent, displaying a steely intelligence
and ferocious nerve that meld beautifully with Jones’ reserve.
While Hank, with one notable exception, never loses that reserve,
Emily fearlessly goes toe-to-toe against her commanding officer,
the head of the Army investigation, a recalcitrant suspect—anybody,
really, who stands between her and finding out what the hell
happened to Mike Deerfield. Thankfully, Haggis refrains from
having Hank and Emily’s relationship, such as it is, develop
into anything either romantic or even cute.
The murder investigation is suspenseful, with the motivation
and background details of Mike’s death remaining murky until
a shocking climax, but it’s really a foundation on which to
build a gripping indictment of the Iraq War and, perhaps,
the state of our nation. As Hank delves into Mike’s remembrances,
he sees a transformation, from good kid with a football to
something far more dangerous, even alien. At one point, Hank’s
wife, Julie (Susan Sarandon), blasts into him for presenting
such a positive image of the military to both of her sons,
thereby casting their fate (Mike’s older brother, we learn,
was killed two years earlier in a helicopter crash). Her maternal
grief is raw and savage, a marked contrast to her husband’s
silent suffering.
As Hank ponders Mike’s final gift to him, one can’t help but
think of John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards from The Searchers,
who famously closes the movie with a stance and expression,
framed on the outside of a farmhouse, that speak volumes about
the disappearance of one’s own way of life, of thinking, and
the acknowledgement of a new and vastly foreign world. Unlike
Ethan, Hank has something to say, in a last act that will
resonate with anybody disgusted and dismayed by the callous
waste of life, world opinion and opportunities evidenced by
our current situation.
Kill
’em All
Resident
Evil: Extinction
Directed
by Russell Mulcahy
In the third installment of the Resident Evil games-to-movies
franchise, there are even more zombies for the series’ sexy
mutant, Alice (Milla Jovovich), to battle—that is, if you
can call it battling, since the zombies are easily dispatched.
A shot or blow to the head, or decapitation, or evisceration,
the traditional methods for undoing the undead, are deployed
in Resident Evil: Extinction with the regularity of
a game, and the encounters have apparently lost something
in the transfer from console to big screen, though the post-apocalypse
set design is rather arresting. In this near-future scenario,
most of the human population has been turned into zombies
by the T-virus, a product-run-amok of a corporate laboratory.
In between zombie attacks and counterattacks is the plot,
which is stuffed with technological and biogenetic horrors,
including a massive flock of killer crows that was sickened
by eating zombie carcasses. If the crow attacks weren’t such
a ripoff of Hitchcock’s The Birds, an allusion to West
Nile Virus might’ve been more wittily noticeable.
In the opening sequence, Alice uses her martial artistry to
escape from an underground lab, where she is attacked by a
succession of foes for no apparent reason. She guns her way
aboveground, where her first encounter with other survivors
is an ambush by a posse of maniacs and their pack of skinless
demon dogs. Eventually, Alice catches up with some comrades
from the previous films and, after using telekinesis to save
some of them from the aforementioned crows, she joins them
on a caravan traveling to Las Vegas for supplies. (Extinction
owes almost as much to Road Warrior as it does
to the games and George Romero.)
Though the gore is graphically snazzy—shots of zombies chomping
on human flesh are the preferred shock tactic—the action choreography
is second-rate. And as if an entire country’s worth of zombies
weren’t enough, the corporation’s mad scientist (Iain Glen)
clones a zombie commando unit. Director Russell Mulcahy (Highlander)
is a former music videographer, and his forte is style: The
film’s fashionably desaturated palette and the cast’s stylishly
survivalist attire almost compensate for the eventual drudgery
of timed-release zombie disposal.
—Ann
Morrow
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