Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park (2007)

For Paranoid Park, Gus Van Sant has adopted Kubrick’s approach to releasing his films with an aspect ratio of 1.33:1 (“full screen”). So to fully enjoy the rich photography, I’d recommend viewing it on a square monitor rather than a rectangular one.


I do not blame the viewer who would stop Paranoid Park within or around the 20 minute mark. Those first 20 minutes are exasperating. ‘What is he doing?’ you might be wondering about Van Sant (most of those who’ll seek this film out will be Van Sant fans and thus willing to humor his indulgences) as he insists on following around newcomer and acting novice Gabe Nevins (born in 1991), a kid who has the expressiveness of a blank wall.

His friends are a paltry bunch, and the bankruptcy of their character is only compounded by their insolence and discourtesy. Then it dawned on me: Alex (Nevins) is the only one who is not insolent or discourteous – he remains silent much of the time amidst the rudimentary discourse of his peers and fellow skate park delinquents.

The introduction of his girlfriend, Jennifer, is a stab to the nerves, as the girl playing her (Taylor Momsen, 15, who the DVD box informs is an actress from “Gossip Girl”) can be best summed up with one word: Ugh. Her acting was so foully amateurish I concluded that the sometimes straying good judgment of Van Sant had now wandered out of sight completely.

But, being an open-minded chap and in the habit of humoring the most discouraging artistic deviations, I stuck with it. As the film progresses, Nevins’ perpetually blank demeanor, when juxtaposed with the simultaneously jaded and callow (the most odious youths of them all) personalities and attitudes of his schoolmates and boarding buddies, becomes a small oasis of reticence. When an abiding police detective (Daniel Liu) asks to speak with all of the boys at the school about the freakish death of a night security guard down at the Portland railway, the boys exhibit the behavior manifested by a complete and utter absence of breeding. Many of these boys, including Alex, are the products of broken homes, and though it seems to be a very minor element of the story, divorce is a crucial theme of this film.

I believe Gus Van Sant and the film is fascinated by Alex for these reasons: compared to the other kids in this movie, he is a paragon of courtesy and introspection. We see his father, clearly once an unsavory individual (both arms have tattoo sleeves); now just a distracted dad, and he inquires about Alex’s life in a perfunctory manner, “You still boarding?” - Alex: “Yeah.” - “Right on.” The film is not condemning parents who divorce, just displaying from a dispassionate perspective the way that divorce is often the result of selfish adults. Divorce can sometimes lead to a vague state of anomie, producing base children and base teenagers. And why shouldn’t they be? Without a reliable positive adult influence, how are they to learn tact? So it is unusual for someone like Alex to surface, who is good and decent and courteous from instinct. He’s a good kid, and Van Sant provided me with one of the most moving and joyous scenes in recent memory: Alex’s little brother, Henry (Dillon Hines), with an uncanny lack of self-consciousness, jubilantly recounts scenes from Napoleon Dynamite in front of his big brother, who listens with tact and abidance. It is a wonderful, wonderful scene.


The film contains Van Sant’s usual brilliant Impressionist renderings of spiritually barren domestic interiors. It also continues his fascination with youth, especially youth on the margins. Anyone who tries to tell you that Van Sant has a prurient ulterior motive when choosing these stories is being obtuse, glib, and mean-spirited. These are generally the same people who, upon superficial inspection, conclude that the sexuality on display in KIDS (1995) is intended to be titillating. I once heard an unsubstantiated item of gossip that Van Sant was sleeping with Elias McConnell, the young man who plays the photographer Eli in Van Sant’s Elephant. Even if that is true, the motivation for making the film was thematic and aesthetic, as was the motivation for making My Own Private Idaho and Last Days, all of which incorporate homosexual youths into the fabric of the story.

Van Sant’s last three films, Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days are all morbid minimalist works; together they constitute Van Sant’s informal “Death Trilogy.” This collection of three, is, in my estimation, among Van Sant’s best work (along with Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho), an avant-garde magnum opus that, by the rigors of its concept, sifts Van Sant’s good directorial propensities and his rotten inclinations, filtering out the crap, and leaving pure, spare lyricism. The films grew increasingly more fatalistic on the journey towards the gloomy end, showing microcosms that took order for granted, finding hidden reserves of lawlessness and despair inside ostensibly functioning systems. So it is a relief to discover that Van Sant has now provided us with a film which quietly observes hidden reserves of thoughtfulness and decency inside derelict communities ostensibly forsaken to philistines.


Grade: A-

4 Luni, 3 Saptamâni si 2 Zile (4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days) (2008)

The first shot of 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days is a doozy: the inside of a dorm room belonging to Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) and Gabita (Laura Vasiliu), winter; the photography has an antiseptic chilliness, and later, when casting its gaze upon the pale Otilia nuzzling and deeply kissing her boyfriend, Adi, inspires repulsion at the lips and skin contact. I have seen this effect before, probably for the very first time in Larry Clark’s Kids where sex was de-eroticized and photographed to look like two husks of smeared flesh were sucking on one another – the skin contact was sickly and hungry: it was gross – and in Cristian Mungiu’s film, while not smeared, the paleness of the actors’ skin, the chilliness of the photography, drains any and all warmth from the physical intimacy. Sex is often like heroin or sleep for some, operating as a momentary escape (witness the animal hunger of Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook) frenziedly pushing her naked skin upon her boyfriend’s naked skin in Mike Leigh's similarly grim social drama, Secrets & Lies (1996), another Palme d’Or winner), a warm body serving as a relief from gray, desolate surroundings. Only these bodies do not look warm, and when they touch one another, the thought of it producing more pallid, dreary souls seems devastating.


Cristian Mungiu has produced a formidable work here, though I have a rather significant reservation.

Spoilers ahead: if you’ve not seen the film, I’d recommend not continuing the review.

Employing long takes and breathing an air of grim urgency into every scene, especially when the handheld camera is tremoring slightly, subliminally, the film commands your attention; even without sound, it is evident that some harrowing, somber inevitability is underway. The kitchen-sink drabness of the proceedings and the often tremoring hand-held 35mm camerawork is reminiscent of another Romanian film, a film some have compared to “watching paint dry,” Cristi Puiu’s Moartea domnului Lazarescu or The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005). However, to find fault with the mundane tedium of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is to completely miss the point, which is the mundane tedium, how what should be the poignant and moving death of a lonely old man becomes a tiresome slog through red tape and the banalities of hospital bureaucracy, rendering his death a relief for the viewer rather than a tragedy. The film is brilliant, an insidious masterpiece. What that film did right and what 4 Months does wrong is Lazarescu doesn’t compromise its seemingly uneventful story. Shot to produce a slightly more rigorous tone of hyper-realism, 4 Months makes a sharp and disastrous turn into lurid melodrama.


If this had been an American film or something that hadn’t won the Palme d’Or or something that didn’t enforce such a grave tone of kitchen sink hyper-realism, then the two girls, Otilia and Gabita, prostituting themselves to the abortionist, would have been predictable. But in a prestige piece like this, such lurid melodrama breaks the atmosphere of quiet despair with a loud, obvious, even clichéd manipulation of viewers' emotions. Perhaps such things really happened, but the way it is handled here is so indelicate, so loud, it struck me as the most unexpected type of pandering.

Everything up to this point is properly prosaic: Otilia’s inability to retrieve a room in the first hotel, the quibbling of the hotel management of the second hotel who insist on exasperating red tape procedures in order to simply reserve a room, the finding of the taxi driver, reassuring the taxi driver, who, we gather from his briefcase, is the abortion proprietor, explaining the reasons why Gabita didn’t follow the arrangements they had discussed over the phone to the man, Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov), Bebe’s lecturing them on why Gabita should have followed the instructions, and then lecturing them on the consequences of the procedure, and then lecturing them on the details, then making sure Gabita is telling him the truth about her circumstances, and finding she lied, asking her why, and if she still wants to continue with the procedure. He drinks some water and tells her to think it over while he steps into the bathroom. When he comes out, she says she does, and then he asks about money. They explain that the hotel room was more expensive than they thought it would be, and he lectures them some more. Otilia, getting sick of his self-righteous laying down of rules and exasperating lectures, becomes visibly perturbed, which makes him erupt in anger and threaten to leave. Gabita begs him not to. Next thing we know, he and Otilia are undressing, Gabita steps out for a cigarette, she steps back in, goes in the bathroom, which Otilia enters, nude from the waist down, and then exits, as Otilia proceeds to squat in the bathtub and scrub her genitals with a bar of soap. I’m sorry, but this is wrong, wrong, wrong. The horror of the film was being very nicely underplayed without having Otilia (and also Gabita it seems to imply) prostitute themselves to the abortionist. After seeing such devolution of the story, I would not have been surprised to see Otilia use the knife she found in Bebe’s briefcase to stab him to death.

Again, such things may have happened, but that doesn’t mean such things, when used for dramatic effect, are not clichés, even if they are rationalized as being non-literal, or a metaphor. Though the film earns back its presented tone of hyper-realism later, and the film continues to be perfectly photographed, lit, and framed, this sequence is fundamental to the film’s impact. In my opinion, the impact is severely dulled by the wrong-headedness of such a plot turn.

Nevertheless, the film is crucial viewing for anyone serious about art films, and despite my reservations, I am neither dismayed nor surprised that it won the Palme d'Or, which, unlike the Academy Awards, by and large, is a signifier of a truly quality film (if you don't believe me, check out some of the other films that won it: The Conversation, Taxi Driver, L'Albero Degli Zoccoli (The Tree of Wooden Clogs), Apocalypse Now, Barton Fink, Pulp Fiction, the already mentioned Secrets & Lies, L'Enfant (The Child), all, if not masterpieces, indisputably thought-provoking and profound works of art). While not the former in my opinion, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days is most definitely the latter.


Grade: A-

Le Scaphandre et le Papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) (2007)

I have no experience with disability, but I have heard that when a person, through birth or by an accident, loses function of one or more of their senses, the others become twice as strong. The body’s nervous system and its natural ability to redistribute the lost power of the terminated faculty to the others is not a minor miracle. I often think of the human body as low and crude, considering the animal mechanisms of pissing, shitting, and copulation, while forgetting the corporeal computer that regulates and commands the more nuanced functions, like the ability to distinguish textures through the fingers. True accounts have displayed the body’s sometimes extraordinary urge to remain alive, despite compounded inflictions. In some cases, the person who resides in the body is regretful of its stubbornness, compelling those who have no conception of such rotten and eternal incapacitation to dispute righteously about the ethical consequences of such an attitude.

But Julian Schnabel’s film, refreshingly, does not have issues of euthanasia or the like on its mind; it is a film that celebrates life and finds heartbreaking joy even in the tiniest remainders. It is far from sentimental, but Jean-Dominique Bauby is gifted with one of the more fortunate assembly of caregivers, and another film about a less successful extreme stroke victim could find just as many convincing reasons to despair as this one does to reassure.

Firstly, Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), when ambulatory, was the editor-in-chief of Elle magazine, a chic and cosmopolitan playboy and mogul. We see brief flashbacks which sweep with him through photography studios populated by cool bohemians in his employ and see how intoxicating a pleasure life must have been for him. So it seems especially cruel that he should be stricken with a sudden and devastating stroke, leaving him paralyzed from head to toe, face contorted into a twisted bundle, utterly unable to express himself save his eyes, one of which must be sewn shut. Amalric’s one eye is more expressive than most actors’ entire faces. What at first seems like a somewhat endearing look of dumb animal helplessness is in fact a bursting inner life: his eye questions, it pleads, it is sometimes delighted at the compassionate solicitude it receives. Amalric is astonishing.

Schnabel insists on shooting the first quarter of the film strictly from Bauby’s point-of-view, a conceit that might cause some to scoff or roll their eye(s), but which worked for me in presenting the heightened consciousness that results from the redistributed powers of the faculties Bauby has lost now allowing his eyes and ears to absorb stimuli twice as richly. Do yourself a favor and watch The Diving Bell and the Butterfly in a quiet room, alone, to fully absorb the sights and the ambience which Schnabel has subliminally amplified. If you allow it, this film will envelop you enough that, when Bauby’s hushed voice-over enters, you’ll be startled to remember that it is not you being looked at and fussed over.



Again, despite my admiration I was nagged by the thought that the fussing would not be graciously spent on a poor black man in the same sort of paralyzed state or even a man the same age and appearance as Bauby, but without his celebrity. He (and we) are often blessed with a revolving door of gorgeous women, who he (and we) are welcome to gaze at close-up, pore-invading, eye-swimming glorious close-ups of actresses like Anne Consigny, Olatz López Garmendia, Emmanuelle Seigner, and Marie-Josée Croze. Garmendia plays Bauby’s physiotherapist, Croze, his speech therapist, Seigner, his concerned ex-wife and the mother of his children, and Consigny is the assistant sent by Bauby’s publisher to take dictation for his book. If you have not seen The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, you’re probably curious as to how someone in Bauby’s condition could have possibly dictated a book...


Using a long, tedious process, his speech therapist, Henriette (Croze) lists off the alphabet in front of him in the order that the letters would most frequently be used (E is the most popular, followed by S, then A, then R, and so on). He blinks when she lands on the letter he is looking for. At first, the process is used merely to communicate with him, but by the end of the film, he has expressed a desire to write a memoir detailing the swirling, trapped inner life of a man with “locked-in syndrome.”

The primary shortcoming of the film is that it is adapted from Bauby’s memoirs of the same title. While the book’s completion represent a Herculean effort, it is a book which would probably not have received such attention had it been produced under normal circumstances. Bauby often narrates his thoughts and often his thoughts are groaning clichés: the diving bell is a heavy suit worn underwater symbolizing his isolation and confinement and the butterfly is his imagination taking flight away and above his caged body. These symbols could be interpreted by a child, conceived by a child, as symbols for isolation and imagination, and it may sound overly harsh to say that the warm acclaim that met his book had little to do with the actual content.

That is not to say that he is not interesting or funny or complex. He is all those things and more, and we come to empathize deeply with Bauby, despite cross admissions of bitterness and self-pity, sometimes stated outright by him via narration, sometimes revealed to us at the same time as he blinks it to Henriette, as when he tells her, but not us beforehand, that he wants to die. Thanks to Henriette (the warm and lovely Marie-Josée Croze, who resembles Naomi Watts) Bauby’s existence remains tolerable, and sometimes even satisfying, as he learns to take comfort in things that he would not have thought twice about while on the go. He is forced to cultivate patience, infinite patience, in his awful condition.

Besides Croze and Amalric, there are stand-out performances from Consigny, Niels Arestrup, and Jarmusch regular Isaach De Bankolé. Most rewarding, though, are the two scenes with the magisterial Max von Sydow as Jean-Dominique’s father, Papinou. As of April 10, 2009, Von Sydow will be 80 years old. I pray that we get 80 more.


Grade: A-

American Gangster (2007)

Ridley Scott makes fine films and is nothing short of a professional but he seems incapable of making a film that distinguishes itself as the work of a singular artist. For this reason I don’t think Ridley Scott will ever graduate from Filmmaker to the exalted rank of Auteur. He shows us lots of people, places, and things in American Gangster, and all are conceived without error, but this very same craftsmanship tells a story without a vision, without an aesthetic that could only have come from one person and one person alone. He doesn’t really have a signature style or possess the idiosyncrasies necessary to imprint an unusual obsession onto the screen. He does his job very well – and that’s just the thing: bringing this story to life appears to be just a job for him rather than a creative endeavor. Too often Scott’s eye feels like that of a tourist. I want to be submerged into the milieu, not have it showcased to me by a foreigner. Scott shows us junkies lying in decrepit torpor on their dirty mattresses, but it is viewed as if it were a presentation in a slideshow about inner city squalor made by someone who’s just passing through. There’s no weight or impact from many of the images because they are presented in an impersonal manner, mechanically. Again, it is done well, but why must it be done by someone who is not passionate about the material? And why must the material feel so dully familiar?

I consider Blade Runner and Alien to be masterpieces, but those were Scott’s 3rd and 2nd films, early works, visions, in a long career of unremarkable celluloid manufacturing. To say a film is unremarkable is not to say it is bad or even mediocre, but that it contains nothing really weird, or intimate, or uncommon, or extraordinary. Gladiator was stirring when I was 14 and the Hans Zimmer score at the end still moves me, but the rest of it is so drearily conventional, so timid in avoiding the Grand Guignol Savagery a film titled Gladiator deserves. Gladiator’s violence is little more brutal or disturbing than the PG-13 creature killings in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Then again, perhaps it was wise for Scott to play it safe; it's doubtful that David Cronenberg’s Gladiator would have won the Academy Award for Best Picture. But it would have been a hell of a lot more interesting.

American Gangster is as unadventurous as Gladiator. It trudges through the motions that other movies have already exercised, about a small-time hood rising in rank, wealth, and desperation and the dogged cop whose dedication to his work has cost him his wife and child. You get two derivations for the price of one; in fact the entire film is a hand-me-down. A refined and intermittently compelling duplicate of rawer, more dangerous movies, American Gangster seems more concerned with being sufficient than exceptional.

It is paced unevenly as well, only finding peaks and valleys in momentum rather than achieving the uphill propulsion of Goodfellas, a film it wants to evoke (as well as others), especially with its very opening scene, a moment of abrupt and jaw-dropping violence. That opening scene certainly grabbed my attention, and was promising, but the rest of the film, though good and well-acted, just isn’t that potent. Ridley Scott needs to stop making films until he finds one that isn’t just another job, but a communication of his personal demons, an exploration of his mind. Other than that, he’s just making a movie.


Grade: C+

Lake of Fire (2007)

I had been very eager to watch Tony Kaye’s documentary (a film 18 years in the making, according to the trailer) since I first heard about it in late 2006. Distributed in limited release, it grossed less than $22,000 and stopped showing in theaters in early November 2007, after opening only a month earlier. It was quickly forgotten about and I don’t recall reading any articles or reviews of it at the time. However, upon further research, I found that it received almost universal critical acclaim, which doesn’t surprise me, considering the film’s sober, impartial manner of presenting both pro-life and pro-choice advocates, as well as interviews with Noam Chomsky, Alan Dershowitz, and Jane Roe herself, Norma McCorvey.

Tony Kaye is capable of considerable more artistry than a Michael Moore documentary and is concerned with balance: he shows despicable pro-life people and despicable pro-choice people who make me feel hesitant to be on either side if they are also on it. The film is defended as being impartial, and presents itself ostensibly as so, but I don’t think the film is as impartial as it would like the audience to believe – it seems to present far more unreasonable pro-life supporters than pro-choice ones. Then again, the pro-life position, itself, draws more fundamentalist religious individuals who have extreme and ludicrous attitudes about justice, tolerance, and social issues in general. These “righteous” members of the nation are more frightening to me in their provincial religious fervor than the controversial public figures or institutions they claim are morally corrupting the country, primarily because the controversial figures they condemn are not commanding obedience. We see intolerant members of both persuasions, but it is inevitable that the fundamentalists will always come off worse. They are more inclined to spout rhetoric founded on a black/white, right/wrong, saved/damned perspective.


But their passion does not end with rhetoric. Those who take every word in the Bible literally and prefer quoting the Old Testament to Jesus can often develop a notion that they know how God’s mind works better than God does, which results in madness. The film interviews a woman who worked with 3 different abortion doctors who were shot dead by assassins, all of whom explained later that they were doing the work of God. One of the murderers approached a doctor as he was exiting his car in the parking lot of his clinic and shouted “Stop killing children!” and then fired 3 shots into the doctor’s back. It is hard for me to despise these killers because they do what they do out of a deluded sense of compassion, not because they needed a scapegoat for their bloodlust. However, I do agree with those who ask, “Where are these same fanatics’ sense of compassion for the already born infants or children suffering outside of the womb?”

The level of power this film has will fluctuate depending on how pressing an issue abortion is to you. I’m sure there are some who will be profoundly moved by it because they feel abortion is a paramount moral crisis; some pro-lifers in the film refer to it as a “Holocaust.” However, being a pragmatist, I think all the time and outrage being devoted to this issue could be better spent serving threatened lives of people who are fully sentient, and already born. Since I form all of my opinions on political and social issues from stand-up comedians (kidding), I’d like to share with you a few choice observations from George Carlin on a great majority of pro-life conservatives:

“They’re all in favor of the unborn. They will do anything for the unborn, but once you’re born, you’re on your own. Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months. After that, they don’t want to know about you, they don’t want to hear from you, no nothin’- no neo-natal care, no daycare, no Head Start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no Welfare, no nothin’.”

He goes onto say, “If a fetus is a human being, how come when there’s a miscarriage, they don’t have a funeral?” I think this is a legitimate challenge. Why, indeed? That bloody flesh discharge was a human life and if removed through abortion would have been classified as murder. So why is it that when the pregnancy is terminated naturally, the bloody flesh discharge is disposed of as if it were simply that, a discharge? That was a human being, right? Where’s the coffin? Where’s the service? Or could it be that the practical costs of a funeral cause these moral crusaders to hesitate? Suddenly their zealous conviction is flexible when faced with the financial consequences of their shining ideals. Practicality is never considered or addressed by them: if all abortion was prohibited, are these same people prepared for the results, the follow-through of their beliefs in action? I realize I’m revealing my bias, but since Lake of Fire asks the question, it is the duty of the audience member to answer, and mine is this: blanket restriction of abortion by uncompromising pro-lifers is short-sighted and favors idealism over reality. As adults, it is only sensible to embrace compromise.

On the other hand, many pro-choice advocates are just as disgraceful – there are rabid defenders of abortion who do so merely out of spite and vindictiveness. Whether or not one considers the fetus a human being or not, everyone must acknowledge that it will be a human being. It doesn’t matter if you snuff out he, she, or its existence before it has visible fingers and toes, or after - an opportunity for life was terminated due to interference. It may just be a “cluster of cells” but that cluster of cells has a future.

Tony Kaye’s film has the benefit of thought-provoking and sensational subject matter, but I didn’t see any particularly new or revelatory insight being communicated here. All of the points being made should be common knowledge to anyone who gives a damn about the issue, and since the only people who will gravitate to his documentary are people intensely interested in the issue (and thus likely well-informed in its particulars), Tony Kaye has an obligation to offer them something more esoteric than what’s presented here.


As is, it’s a basic tutorial on the pros and cons of abortion, but since it is the first notable documentary on the issue, it seems more significant than it really is. Since the material it covers is pretty superficial, it stretches the running time to supplement. It’s 2 hours and 32 minutes and restates the same fundamental message of the film, that this topic is too complicated for right/wrong divisions, again and again and again. I don’t take issue with lengthy films so long as the length is necessary. There is a lot of padding here to hide the leaner, better documentary inside. The self-righteous choral music attempts to impose profundity on proceedings that were obtaining a gravity just fine without it.

Abortion is tricky subject matter, this we know, and Tony Kaye’s film repeats this knowledge back to us. If it took him 18 years to make Lake of Fire, we're owed about another 16 years worth of effort and advancement.


Grade: C+

In the Valley of Elah (2007)

Yes, I remember strongly disliking Crash the one and only time I saw it in the theater back in the summer of ’05. I still expected good things from this, because from what I had gathered, Tommy Lee Jones took up about 95% of the screen time.

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-