Dans la vallée d'Elah (2007)
"Dans la vallée d'Elah" : quand la guerre en Irak contamine les valeurs de l'Amérique
Hollywood n'a pas attendu la fin de la guerre en Irak pour en faire un réservoir à fictions. Réalisé par Paul Haggis, l'auteur de Collision (2004), Dans la vallée d'Elah est le premier d'une lignée de films sur le sujet, et il impressionne par sa hauteur de vue. Dès son générique, il s'affiche comme un film antiguerre, avec un trio d'acteurs qui compte parmi les plus politisés d'Hollywood : l'infatigable Susan Sarandon, connue pour ses prises de position virulentes contre la guerre en Irak, Tommy Lee Jones, ami d'Al Gore et fervent démocrate, la belle Charlize Theron, qui prend régulièrement la parole en faveur de diverses causes.Le film trouve sa force - autant que ses limites - dans un scénario très bien construit, sensible, dont la portée critique dépasse ce conflit spécifique pour mettre en cause d'une manière plus générale l'idéologie militariste et le patriotisme aveugle. Le contraire aurait surpris : avant de réaliser ses propres films, Paul Haggis s'est d'abord distingué comme l'un des meilleurs scénaristes d'Hollywood, en signant notamment les scénarios les plus récents de Clint Eastwood (Million Dollar Baby, Mémoires de nos pères et Lettres d'Iwo Jima).
Hormis quelques images filmées avec un téléphone portable, Dans la vallée d'Elah se passe entièrement sur le sol américain. Il suit l'enquête de Hank, un officier à la retraite (Tommy Lee Jones) désireux de retrouver son fils, un vétéran d'Irak signalé comme déserteur peu de temps après son retour au pays.
Hank rencontre les camarades de son rejeton, glane quelques indices et apprend rapidement que celui dont il est à la recherche est mort dans des conditions atroces : découpé en morceaux, calciné, dévoré par les charognards... La violence du choc renforce sa détermination, et il s'impose alors comme partenaire officieux de la femme flic (un peu trop proprement interprétée par Charlize Theron) chargée de l'affaire.
L'enquête patine d'abord, s'égare dans de fausses pistes, puis se resserre sur le coeur de l'armée. Invariablement, chacune de ses avancées s'impose à Hank comme un coup de lame supplémentaire dans une plaie béante.
Il doit bientôt admettre que son fils était loin du bon garçon qu'il croyait avoir élevé. Plus douloureusement encore, ses recherches lui révèlent comment les conditions de la guerre en Irak ont poussé les soldats à franchir les limites de la dignité humaine, et comment leur perdition morale contamine aujourd'hui la conscience de l'Amérique.
Là se trouve le noeud de l'enquête, mais aussi la tragédie de Hank, à laquelle l'interprétation tout en douleur contenue de Tommy Lee Jones apporte une dimension poignante. Le solide alliage de patriotisme, de dignité et de virilité sur lequel ce vieil homme a bâti sa vie va se dissoudre. Un gouffre de culpabilité va s'ouvrir en lui. Car c'est à cause de ce système de valeurs qu'il portait si haut que ses deux fils ont choisi de suivre leur père et qu'ils ont tous les deux perdu la vie.
Implacable, le scénario confère au film une certaine rigidité, qui est le propre des films à thèse. Mais il se distingue par l'intelligence avec laquelle s'y imbriquent la tragédie individuelle et la grande histoire. Non content de pointer la contradiction entre le code de l'honneur de l'armée et la manière dont celle-ci a encouragé la torture, Paul Haggis met à mal toutes les valeurs de l'Amérique conquérante, montre qu'elles vont de pair avec des fléaux comme la misogynie ou le racisme.
Forcé de renoncer à ses mythes, le vieil officier va apprendre qu'une serveuse de bar topless peut être une femme aimable et respectable, qu'un voyou latino peut receler plus d'humanité qu'un jeune Blanc aux cheveux courts. Autrement dit que la racine du mal n'est pas chez l'autre, en Irak, ou chez les trafiquants de drogue, mais bien à domicile. Et qu'elle contamine l'Amérique bien-pensante de l'intérieur.
Film américain de Paul Haggis avec Tommy Lee Jones, Charlize Theron, Susan Sarandon. (2 heures.)
Seeking Clues to a Son’s Death and a War’s Meaning
Viewed from one angle — straight on, from the ground level of its busy plot — “In the Valley of Elah” might be mistaken for a tidy crime procedural. A retired military police officer named Hank Deerfield (played by Tommy Lee Jones with his usual brisk, gruff economy) learns that his son Mike (Jonathan Tucker), an Army specialist recently returned from Iraq, has gone AWOL from his base in New Mexico.
As in an episode of “Law & Order,” suspicion veers one way and then another as new information comes to light. Was it drug dealers? Gang members? Soldiers from the young man’s own squad? Was Mike himself guilty of terrible things? Paul Haggis, the writer and director, obeys the rules of the whodunit genre by providing answers to some of the basic, literal questions at the center of the film. And considered strictly as a crime drama, “In the Valley of Elah” is a bit pedestrian, with a few too many set pieces, extraneous subplots and predictable turns.
But an air of irresolution nonetheless lingers around it, a sorrowful, frustrated sense that the deepest mysteries cannot be contained within any narrative framework. Underneath its deceptively quiet surface is a raw, angry, earnest attempt to grasp the moral consequences of the war in Iraq, and to stare without blinking into the chasm that divides those who are fighting it from their families, their fellow citizens and one another.
This is not to say that the detective story, suggested by the actual murder of Specialist Richard Davis in 2003, is entirely beside the point. Rather, the mechanics of the plot — the forensic discoveries, the squabbles over jurisdiction between military and civilian authority, the rounds of paperwork and the squad-room arguments — serve as the scaffolding for a more unsettling, open-ended inquiry. Much as Hank wants to know what happened to Mike the night he died, his real quest is to find out who his son was, and what happened to him in Iraq.
The only clues he has are some JPEGs his son e-mailed to him, the memory of a desperate late-night phone call from the war zone and some smeary, scrambled video recovered from Mike’s cellphone. These hectic, unfocused clips stand in jarring, pointed contrast to the neatly composed frames and carefully paced shots that make up most of Mr. Haggis’s film, and they pose an agonizing challenge: How do you extract meaning from such chaos?
To his great credit, Mr. Haggis tries to coax an answer out of his story rather than imposing one on it from the start, as he did in “Crash.” That film, which owes its best-picture Oscar to the dedication of its cast and the obviousness of its themes, turned racial intolerance into fodder for a self-righteous, schematic allegory.
While “In the Valley of Elah” has its share of overreaching and throat clearing — including clumsy references to the biblical story of David and Goliath, the source of its title — it is mostly free of moral grandstanding. (A brief scene in which Hank gives voice to some of his half-buried ethnic bigotry is more credible than any of the similar moments that make up most of “Crash.”)
Not that the message of “In the Valley of Elah” is ambiguous or unclear. The message is that the war in Iraq has damaged this country in ways we have only begun to grasp. For some people this will seem like old news. Others — in particular those who pretend that railing against movies they haven’t seen is a form of rational political discourse — may persuade themselves that it is provocative or controversial.
But however you judge the movie’s politics, and whatever its flaws, there is something inarguable, something irreducibly honest and right, about Mr. Jones’s performance. Hank exists on a continuum with the other lawmen he has recently played, in particular the Texas sheriffs in “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada,” which he directed, and Joel and Ethan Coen’s “No Country for Old Men,” which will be released later this fall.
Like them, Hank carries around an innate sense of right and wrong, and Mr. Jones’s creased face, at once kindly and severe, is a manifest sign of his old-school temperament. Hank is the kind of man who shines his shoes every night, says grace before each meal and makes his motel-room bed according to military standards.
It’s unlikely that a veteran M.P., whose service covered at least some of the Vietnam years, would entertain the illusion that all fighting men are Boy Scouts. But it is clear that Hank has both a general fondness for soldiers and a father’s assumption that he knows his own son. That may be part of why the grisly nature of Mike’s fate, and the possibility that some of his buddies were responsible for it, disturbs him so much. Something, he suspects, has gone terribly wrong with the institutions and the men he has always loved and trusted.
At every point, as Hank nags and pushes Emily in her investigation, the movie registers the panic and dread that he fights to keep down. These feelings come through to some extent in the reactions of his wife, Joan (Susan Sarandon), whom he tries to protect, but more decisively, and more hauntingly, through the moods Mr. Haggis creates (with the crucial assistance of Roger Deakins, the cinematographer responsible for the movie’s austere, washed-out look, and Mark Isham, who wrote the eerie, sparingly applied musical score).
Almost no violence takes place on screen, but there are times when “In the Valley of Elah” feels almost like a horror film. Its steady crescendo of suspense builds toward the revelation — and vanquishing — of some unspeakable, monstrous evil.
But since the monster has no identifiable physical shape, it is not so easily defeated. While there are killers, liars and sadists to be found in this movie, there are not really any villains. And there is no reassuring conclusion. If it is anguished, even despairing, “In the Valley of Elah” is also compassionate. At heart it is a somber ballad about young men who remain lost in a dangerous, confusing place even after they come home.
“In the Valley of Elah” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). There are some violent scenes and a general atmosphere of brutality and fear.
IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH
Opens today in New York and Los Angeles.
Directed by Paul Haggis; written by Mr. Haggis, based on a story by Mark Boal and Mr. Haggis; director of photography, Roger Deakins; edited by Jo Francis; music by Mark Isham; production designer, Laurence Bennett; produced by Patrick Wachsberger, Steven Samuels, Darlene Caamano Loquet, Mr. Haggis and Laurence Becsey; released by Warner Independent Pictures. Running time: 120 minutes.
WITH: Tommy Lee Jones (Hank Deerfield), Charlize Theron (Emily Sanders), Susan Sarandon (Joan Deerfield), James Franco (Sergeant Carnelli), Jonathan Tucker (Mike Deerfield), Frances Fisher (Evie), Jason Patric (Lieutenant Kirklander) and Josh Brolin (Chief Buchwald).
