In The Valley of Elah

In the Valley of Elah desperately wants to be a weighty and important film. You can see the effort being expended as it tries to show how war changes soldiers, and that it can lead them commit horrible acts when they return unable to adjust to everyday life after everything they've seen. The problem is the harder it worked bang this point home the less I cared. Oh the film is reasonably well done, Tommy Lee Jones would be entertaining reading a phone book, and Charlize Theron (in full on uglied up mode to really ram home that this is a 'serious' movie) is usually competent. The problem is that the film isn't content with letting the story speak for itself, no it wants to bludgeon you to death with its themes to make sure everything sinks in. Want to show that Tommy Lee Jones' character still has all his former military training internalized? Why not showing making the hotel bed just like a military bunk three different times. Want to show that crazy things happen to soldiers' minds when they go back to war? Don't just have Jones' character's son be possibly murdered and chopped up in a fit of blind rage by his unit buddies, throw in another unrelated soldier who drowns his doberman then murders his wife and leaves her in the bathtub so Theron can cry while holding her hand. You get the idea. Throw in a huge dose of Jones' character going Encyclopedia Brown on the local police force while they investigate his son's death (seriously the entire film involves him walking up to a scene and in five minutes saying exactly what happened) and the whole thing just became overwhelmingly pedantic and tiresome. Its too bad because I think there's a good idea for film buried in there, unfortunately the filmmakers were too concerned with making sure that everyone watching understand what important points they were making about the human condition that they killed any real human emotion that the story could have possessed.