[NYTr] Film on trauma of troops back from Iraq hits Venice

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

See also Prensa Latina: 

"Redacted" - De Palma's Unsparing Look at US Crimes in Iraq, Sep 2, 2007
https://blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/Week-of-Mon-20070827/067577.html

Reuters via Yahoo - Sep 2, 2007
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070901/ts_nm/venice_iraq_dc_2


Film on trauma of troops back from Iraq hits Venice

By Mike Collett-White

VENICE (Reuters) - The scars from the Iraq war do not heal when
U.S. soldiers return home, says a powerful new film starring Tommy
Lee Jones that keeps the conflict at the heart of the Venice film
festival this year.

After Brian De Palma's "Redacted" stunned audiences with its
reconstruction of horrific events in Iraq, Paul Haggis' "In the
Valley of Elah" brings a more nuanced, yet moving account of the
brutality some soldiers bring back to the United States.

Jones has the critics searching for the superlatives as a man whose
son is murdered after returning from Iraq, and as he pieces together
what happened, the Vietnam war veteran begins to question his faith
in his country and its policies.

One of the defining images of the film is the American flag flying
upside down, a sign of a nation in distress.

Haggis said he had tried not to allow his personal opinion about
the war in Iraq to influence "Elah" too heavily.

"We set about to make a political film certainly, but not a partisan
film," he told a news conference in Venice, where the film has its
world premiere on Saturday.

He said that although support for the Iraq war had waned in the
United States, he began putting "Elah" together when the invasion
was still popular.

"When we started on this project, our president had an 80 percent
approval rating, everyone was driving around with flags on their
cars and our president was telling us that it was unpatriotic to
even question what was happening in Iraq.

"At that time all these films were very difficult to get financed,
very difficult to make."

Clint Eastwood was among those who helped get the project off the
ground, Haggis said in his production notes.

TRUE STORY

The film is inspired by the true story of a soldier whose father
investigates his mysterious death near his army base in the United
States in 2003. He learns his son was stabbed to death by comrades,
two of whom were convicted of the murder.

Jones plays the taciturn Hank Deerfield, who downloads images from
his dead son's mobile phone that offer grainy glimpses of what he
went through in Iraq, and reveal that Mike was not the model soldier
his father believed him to be.

Jones, 60, was not in Venice because he was undergoing eye surgery,
according to Haggis.

Charlize Theron and Susan Sarandon play a local detective and Mike's
mother respectively.

Theron said U.S. troops in Iraq were doing a "serious and important"
job, but added: "I'd like to see them come home, to be looked after,
be nurtured, and nothing would give me more joy than to see them
here back in America."

"Elah" bears comparison to movies about the fallout of Vietnam on
Americans -- "Coming Home" and "The Deer Hunter" -- both made after
that conflict had ended.

In the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, at least six films on the topic
are due out soon as the operations continue.

Haggis, whose 2005 film "Crash" was an Oscar for best picture, said
this was partly because journalists were failing.

"During the Vietnam war, we had terrific journalists doing their
job, reporting on things that we didn't want to hear ... Now we
don't have that. I think that when that doesn't happen, then it's
the responsibility of the artist to ask those difficult questions."

(For blogs about the Venice film festival, please see:
http://blogs.reuters.com/category/events/venice-2007/)