[in the valley of elah]

Paul Haggis does far more writing that directing. If it were the other way around I would like him a little more.

It's not that his scripts aren't improving - they are, especially here. The scenes he writes for Tommy Lee Jones are sturdy, unshowy, and dramatially interesting. It's too bad the roles he writes for men aren't nearly as good as the ones he writes for women - Charlize Theron, as a harassed policewoman, is wasted in a thanklessly dumb role here (Haggis seems to be trying to bring her over from North Country), and nearly all of the scenes featuring Susan Sarandon are cringe-worthy (that said, Theron and Sarandon both do what they can and give solid performances). The policemen who work with (and harass) Theron are silly caricatures.

A lot of In the Valley of Elah feels strangely detached. It's like Haggis is trying to pull out the best details from a story, but picks all the wrong details. Much of the film feels more like a fable about Small Town America than The War. Other bits of it drag on some kind of silly metaphor through the story about David and Goliath Jones, as Hank Deerfield, tells to a boy. The metaphor doesn't quite add up - in fact, it makes no sense. Haggis should stay away from this - he's far better and welling up tears from raw sentimentality, as he did some in Crash and the script for Letters from Iwo Jima.

Yet, every time In the Valley of Elah feels like it's drifting into a somewhat random, uninteresting epsidode of CSI: Iraq, Haggis whips out a deftly powerful scene - like one where Theron's Detective Emily Sanders (how's that for lame character names?) comes upon the corpse of a woman in a bathtub, or when Hank watches videos his son took from Iraq on his cellphone.

All the thanks and credit should go to composer Mark Isham, who wields low strung, mourful melodies, and Tommy Lee Jones, who makes acting beautiful. Jones is so subtle, he's not even showy about not being showy. There's just no showiness of which to speak. But he can move stones with his deep, sad dog's eyes, bewildered expression, and disillusioned stare. We get it: this is the face of the American during the Iraq war. It's this ultimate tie-in to our current lifestyle that's the film's redeeming hoist.

Rating: [**½]