Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
Paul Haggis trumps other Iraq dramas by shouldering the burden of being unpatriotic, says Peter Bradshaw Whether or not it wins Oscars, this certainly marks a new and resonant low in relations between Hollywood and the outgoing presidential incumbent.
Written and directed by Paul Haggis -_a winner for his multi-stranded 2004 drama Crash - it is a procedural thriller starring Tommy Lee Jones as Hank Deerfield, a retired military-police officer who is informed by the US army that the body of his son Mike, a serving soldier, has been recovered from scrubland around his base in Fort Rudd, New Mexico.
Both Hank and cop Detective Emily Sanders, played by Charlize Theron, suspect a military cover-up and determine to get at the truth, which may stem from an unspecified "incident" involving Mike's unit during its final tour in Iraq, fragments of which appear to have been filmed on Mike's mobile phone.
Thus far, almost every single mainstream Hollywood movie about politics or the war on terror, however notionally critical or satirical, has been defanged and auto-castrated at the outset by its own terror of being thought unpatriotic.
Whatever its faults, that certainly doesn't apply to Haggis' film, which finishes with a boldly challenging and even blasphemous shot of the star-spangled banner.
The title, incidentally, refers to the location for David's contest with Goliath, which grumpy and uncomfortable Hank finds himself telling as a bedtime story to Emily's little boy David.
Elah, he says, is "a place in Palestine. D'you know where it is?" "No," admits David. "Doesn't matter," shrugs Hank, wearily tolerant of modern ignorance.
Perhaps the alternative term "Israel" would have been more familiar to the boy. At any rate, Hank has had to swallow his rage and anguish, and with a soldier's self-discipline, learned over a lifetime, decides to delay his grief until he has discovered the truth about his son's death.
A sad old man on a mission, he leaves his devastated wife Joan (Susan Sarandon) behind him, refusing to talk about the family issues that this latest tragedy has reignited, and takes a motel room near the base, intent on pursuing his own investigation. Hank insists on making the bed himself and polishing his shoes to a brilliant shine each morning, holding on to these military rigours as a distraction from despair.
Sanders is a single mum, with a parent's instinctive sympathy for lonely Hank; she is bullied and teased by her male colleagues, who sneer at the open secret of her now extinct affair with their boss, Chief Buchwald, played by the taciturn Josh Brolin.
As well as dealing with the boorish and incompetent males in power over her, she pursues her own jurisdictional turf war with the military police, but her own impulsive faith in her new ally and friend Hank is to be rewarded with a violent fiasco.
Haggis' rhetoric and pacing are always sure-footed; unlike Crash, there is never a moment where anything rings false. It is a powerful, muscular film, and there is real anger and fear at its heart.
