August
30
'Flags of Our Sons' Review
This just in, Robert Koehler’s review of Paul Haggis’ latest, In the Valley of Elah:
Working overtime to be an important statement on domestic dissatisfaction with the war and the special price paid by vets and their families, Paul Haggis’ follow-up to “Crash” is too self-serious to work as a straight-ahead whodunit and too lacking in imagination to realize its art-film aspirations. … It also continues a line of recent movies addressing the first Gulf War (“Jarhead”) and the current one (“Home of the Brave,” “Grace Is Gone”) that fail to capture the realities of war experience and familial angst beyond basic truisms and pictorial sur-faces.
Doesn’t sound like he liked it much. Personally, I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the film. It’s clear that Haggis has learned something from working with Eastwood, trusting his actors (and the audience) to convey many of the Big Ideas he felt compelled to put directly in their mouths in Crash. And then, as Premiere.com’s Glenn Kenny wondered in his reaction to an early screening, “Can a good, often wrenching, entirely pertinent film completely blow it in its last five minutes? … I really hope not.”
Oh, but it can. Suffice it to say, from now on, In the Valley of Elah should instead be called “Flags of Our Sons.” Kenny again: “In this case, the filmmaker shows us how that war distorts, mutates, deranges, the people who fight in it, and what happens when the derangement comes home.” The showing I love; it's the telling I could do without. It all reminds me of the poster above for the Rod Lurie movie The Last Castle, which was withdrawn out of sensitivity after 9/11. Now, Haggis might argue, would be the time to hang it.
P.S. Good news from the Elah junket, thanks to Collider... Haggis provides an update on the new Bond movie:
I’m on page 22. … It’s an original and it’s not based on any book or short story or anything that Ian Fleming had done. Although it is based on Ian Fleming ideas. And it starts right after the last one, two minutes after Casino Royale this movie starts.”
—Posted by Peter Debruge
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The emperor has no clothes--big surprise
Posted by: Kurt | August 31, 2007 at 09:07 AM