Tommy Lee Jones plays Hank Deerfield (this name fits perfectly for some reason I can’t explain), a man with the austerity of a monk. He is also severely patriotic: upon seeing the American flag inexplicably hanging upside-down when driving past an elementary school, he stops his truck. Cut to: Hank watching a Hispanic custodian bringing the flag down to right it and when part of the flag briefly rests on the concrete, Hank says, “Never let it touch the ground.” Whoa. He explains to the custodian what an upside-down flag means, and goes on his way.Hank is an ex-Sergeant himself, both of his sons are in the military as well (we find out that the older boy was killed when his helicopter was shot down) and he has just received a phone call informing him that his last surviving son, Mike, has gone missing from his base shortly after returning from a tour of duty in Iraq. He packs a suitcase and drives to his son’s base, and asks to see his quarters, where he meets some of his son’s bunkmates and fellow soldiers. Haggis is able to convey a sense of military omertà among these young men deftly - Hank is not going to find much here, except dubious condolences, and before long, he gets a knock on his motel room door from a marine in a beret. Hank tells him to wait a moment while he uses the bathroom. When Hank steps out, he is greeted by an eerie, striking image: the soldier in the beret is standing at attention, saluting, in the doorway, with the door still wide open, the daylight flooding into the room, shadowing the soldier so that he appears to be a saluting spectre. Hank pauses to process the oddness of what he is seeing, and then returns the salute, at which point, he is informed that his son, Mike, has been found.
This film is inspired by the real story of Richard Davis, a soldier who disappeared in the summer of 2003 after returning from a tour in Iraq. The young man’s father, Lanny Davis, a retired veteran, began his own investigation, and it was later revealed that Davis was murdered by four other soldiers who served with him in his tour of duty, his brothers-in-arms, his comrades. Reading about the night of Davis’s murder offers as little motivation for the killing (he was stabbed 33 times) as the film does, other than explaining that his buddies were drunk, pissed off at him, and were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. The film keeps all these details, but increases the number of stab wounds to 42. Needless to say, I was almost as upset to hear that number as Hank was, when sparing himself no mercy he demands to hear every detail from the medical examiner.
Tommy Lee Jones is fascinating to watch in this, and his performance really deserves to be in a great movie. It is obvious from the film’s somberness and overbearing dirge-choir that Haggis thinks his film is Important, and though I admire much of it, it basically becomes a pretty standard Murder Investigation in the Military Film. This might be a legitimate sub-genre of the Police Procedural, but Haggis’s film hasn’t transcended its peers, A Few Good Men and Courage Under Fire, though it labors under the delusion that it has because it covers a current topic. Is it relevant? Yes. Is it a film worth watching? Yes. It has some fine moments, such as when a Detective (Charlize Theron) invites Hank over for dinner in order to share some information about the case with him. Theron’s character is a single-mother of a 9 or 10 year old boy, who likes to have his bedroom door left ajar after lights out.
Hank is asked to read him a bedtime story, but because he can’t make sense of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Hank tells the boy a story from the Old Testament: David and Goliath. This Bible story is where the film’s title comes from.
After telling the boy the story and a comically terse “goodnight,” he closes the boy’s bedroom door, leaving him in the pitch darkness. I was waiting for Theron’s son to cry out “Door!” like he did earlier when she did the same thing, but he doesn’t. Hank walks past Theron who tells him that her son likes the door ajar, and Hank informs her, “He’ll be okay.” Seconds later, the boy cries out “Door!” and Theron opens it a bit, and the boy tells her to close it more than usual, but still leaving it a bit open. We see the vertical rectangle of light on the boy narrow until just some of his face is lit. This is a perfect and not openly acknowledged symbol of Hank’s, and to a larger extent, the Military's, deluded attitude about thrusting young men into war: sure, they are men and men are tough, so they’ll be okay, right? No, no they won’t.Grade: B-
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