Down in the Valley

What would have been unthinkable in his day is becoming a reality and Jones does a great job of keeping this anger and frustration barely suppressed beneath the surface of his character.

Paul Haggis' direction and the acting of the cast is difficult to fault. Tommy Lee Jones puts in one of the best performances of his career (the best since The Three Burials of Melquiadas Estadas where he plays a similar character), portraying a man with the weight of years upon his shoulders with dogged determination and resolution; Charlize Theron is wonderfully restrained in her role as a police homicide detective struggling to justify her position to her chauvinistic male colleagues, whilst trying to be a capable single mother and the short performance by Susan Sarandon is no less moving for its brevity.

Paul Haggis' direction brilliantly manages to bring out the emotion in his characters but never pushes for the acting to be sensationalist and it's this that keeps the film believable and realistic. He's smart enough to know when to point the camera at Tommy Lee Jones and let the actor do his the rest. It actually feels like the opposite of Haggis' previous film Crash, where subtlety certainly wasn't the watchword.

However, the way that the plot arcs tie together is rather contrived; Hank hiring a strangely helpful technician to help him decode his son's mobile phone footage seems quite odd, especially considering it acts as an obvious plot device to provide helpfully episodic glimpses into his son's tour in Iraq. And when the killer finally confesses, his explanation of why he did it doesn't really seem believable, nor does his reason for confessing in the first place. This quick resolution prevents the film from being completely satisfying.

Despite its problems, Paul's Haggis' second directorial outing is a thought provoking crime drama, shorn of the obvious agenda found in Crash, which admirably touches on aftermath of war on a much more personal level. Bitter, tender and real.