In the Valley of Elah

When a soldier goes AWOL after returning from Iraq, his father (Tommy Lee Jones) travels to the son’s Army base in New Mexico in an effort to get to the bottom of his disappearance. Writer-director Paul Haggis, fictionalizing a 2004 Playboy article by Mark Boal about a murky and squalid real-life life case, turns his story into a metaphor for everything that’s wrong with the Iraq war, and the film has something like the candlelit solemnity of a 1960s peace rally (complete with a mournful folk singer over the closing credits). Haggis freights the film with portentous symbolism (the title refers to where David slew Goliath), but what saves it from ponderousness is the fine acting—Jones especially, but also Susan Sarandon as his distraught wife and Charlize Theron as a sympathetic police detective.