After assiduously watching Million Dollar Baby, Flags of our Fathers,
Letters from Iwo Jima, and hearing an interview with Paul Haggis (who
wrote them all) lamenting this film's nosedive at the box office, my
interest was piqued. My expectation that it was going to be some top
down intrigue potboiler ascribing evil to the brass in Iraq was
pleasantly disappointed. By the end, when you find out his fellow
soldiers murdered the son, it has the strange and almost unprecedented
(in my memory) effect of making the whole ostensible motive of the
plot a red herring. These guys died in Iraq. Back stateside they
just thrashed around like hungry ghosts and keeping up appearances.
Very effective and actually about something real and unadorned that is
happening now. I don't feel that it was amped up for Hollywood
purposes very much at all. The performance Tommy Lee Jones turned in
just grows in the memory. So much inner stuff conveyed so well. Shot
for shot the directing was serviceable and unflashy which is a
testament to a lot of knowingness from Haggis, who hasn't directed
much. The film redeems him from what I see as an embarrassment in
Crash. (think I wrote some notes about that at the time).