Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #236 in DVD
• Released on: 2008-05-26
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 2.40:1
• Format: PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 121 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
Notch up another great role for Tommy Lee Jones here, as his starring performance in the lead of In The Valley Of Elah is a further acting performance of real merit. And this from the man who has already recently added the equally excellent No Country For Old Men to his CV.

In The Valley Of Elah, however, is a very different beast. It’s the new film from writer/director Paul Haggis, he who previously brought us Oscar-winner Crash, and Jones stars as Hank Deerfield, a man who decides to take matters into his own hands when he finds out that his son has disappeared. However, what complicates matters is that Deerfield’s son is a soldier on leave, and the military are proving to be little help in getting to the bottom of the mystery.

Yet there’s far more to In The Valley Of Elah than that, even though its narrative is interesting and surprising. No, there are real layers of drama here, and none more obvious than those surrounding Jones’ character (the lead actor, incidentally, snagged a richly-deserved Oscar nomination for his work here). He’s an understated, yet brilliant, creation, and one quite wonderfully brought to life. In conjunction with Susan Sarandon as his wife, and Charlize Theron as the detective he enlists the help of, In The Valley Of Elah emerges as one of the most unfairly overlooked films of recent times, and one that’s ripe for discovery on DVD. A superb piece of work. --Jon Foster

DVD Description
Synopsis

"Your son is missing." It’s the phone call every soldier’s father dreads. What Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones) had never thought to fear was that this call would come when his son was home in the U.S., on leave from service in Baghdad. Facing military indifference to the disappearance, Hank decides to take matters into his own hands and discover the truth about what’s happened to his son. With the reluctant help of police detective Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron), Hank embarks on a journey that will bring him up against the closed ranks of the armed forces and the harsh realities of modern warfare.

Written and directed by Academy Award ®- winner Paul Haggis and starring three Academy Award ®-winning actors – Tommy Lee Jones, Charlize Theron and Susan Sarandon – alongside James Franco, Josh Brolin and Jason Patric, In the Valley of Elah is the powerful story of one father’s search for the truth.

Customer Reviews

"a real grown up movie"
There are plenty of reviews regarding this fabulous film so I'll keep it short. Proof that real grown up movies are still made in the west. Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron are superb. Buy it!!

Excellent. Bleak, but excellent
So first off, ignore the cover. Tommy Lee Jones with the torch and Charlize Theron with her gun drawn underneath the words AN INTENSE THRILLER rather implies a lot of chases, gunplay and other shenanigans. Without giving anything away, there is one chase. Charlize Theron does have a gun and TLJ a torch (although I'm not sure if he ever turns it on). But I'm already getting distracted.

As you can see from the other reviews, TLJ plays a retired solider, who is told that his son has gone missing, shortly after returning from Iraq. He then spends the rest of the film single mindedly battling to find out what happened to him, with no help from the Army. After initial reluctance, he is helped by Charlize Theron and they piece together what happened.

But that's rather incidental. The film is quiet and sober, but also angry about Iraq. About what we are doing to it, but even more so about what it is doing to our young men. And, in turn, to the rest of us. It's about a father who has already lost one son and can't bear the prospect of losing another.

The cast are uniformly excellent, and this is well worth a watch. It is very bleak, be warned, but highly recommended.

A pleasant surprise
The 2007 film written and directed by Paul Haggis, starring Tommy Lee Jones, Charlize Theron, and Susan Sarandon was an unexpected treat to good acting, tension and resoultion. How good films should be made! Tommy Lee Jones is superb and every wrinkle of his faces betrays volumes of emotions that want to shout out over the needless loss of a son.

In The Valley of Elah is based on actual events. The plot explores themes of the Iraq war, abuse of prisoners and PTSD following active combat.

The film portrays a father's hunt for his son's killers. Here is where the Biblical allusion starts. The Valley of Elah was the location of the battle between David and Goliath in the war between the Philistines and Israelis - a clue to the real subject of the film. IT reinforces an important lesson in a society which is largely demilitarised: war changes people, and can often deform or reform them. What carries the film's tension is the confrontational atmosphere.

The ending is though is a let-down - suddenly a solution through a confession is presented. What lacks is that we never get inside the heads of those who commit the murder. It would be important to understand the way that the soldiers are changed by their experiences. Not enough is shown of what propels people into the army. We never understand these young men's earlier lives - hence we don't know to what extent what they become now has already been innate.

One of the film's aims is to bring America itself to its own valley of Elah - its own confrontation with what it has done to its young men.