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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Movie Listings
The Film File
In his long movie career, Tommy Lee Jones has never wasted a word or an emotion. When he's silent, his glinting eyes and suppressed smile suggest a secret held in reserve. When he speaks, at Gatling-gun speed, the words come out as definitive. There's no arguing with this man; he doesn't give you an opening. He says only what he wants to say, and he delivers his lines with commanding off-kilter intonations (rising when you would expect falling, or just deadpan). Jones is the driest and most thoroughly stylized of American movie stars--a natural-born hipster wit--but he's not a lightweight. Even in a spoof like "Men in Black," his ease and quickness carried authority (and he didn't let the grinning Will Smith ace him out). In Paul Haggis's "In the Valley of Elah," Jones plays a Vietnam vet and former M.P., Hank Deerfield, whose son, Mike, after serving in Iraq, has gone AWOL in America. Jones has portrayed military men before, but Hank Deerfield is the role of a lifetime, and he has stripped himself of any vestige of vanity to play it. The vertical lines in his face run deeper than ever; a ten-dollar haircut exposes his big ears. Suddenly, he's a primal American image--awkwardly iconic, with a creased-leather face from a Depression photograph--and he gives a great, selfless, and heartbreaking performance that completely dominates this elusive but powerful movie. Haggis, the...
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