Venice Film Festival

In the Valley of Elah
****
Redacted
****

With so many American films in competition at Venice this year, there were bound to be themes concerning the debacle of the Iraq war.

Oscar winner Paul Haggis's In the Valley of Elah has Tommy Lee Jones as an army veteran searching for his son, who has gone missing after returning from Iraq.

Brian De Palma's Redacted, using high-definition video, mixes documentary and fictional footage to describe the horrors of the occupation from both the American and Iraqi points of view.

Haggis's film is likely to reach more screens than De Palma's since it has Susan Sarandon supporting Jones as the missing soldier's distraught mother, who has already lost one son, and Charlize Theron as the police detective helping him in his search.

Early in the film, we realise that the soldier has been murdered and his body cut into little pieces and buried. It isn't giving too much away to say that.

The theme of the film is that the occupation is so fraught that those returning are all too likely to be devastatingly affected.

Tommy Lee Jones is superb in a well-written and directed film and his carefully understated performance is what makes it so watchable as a thriller that is also an implicit criticism of American policy.

There is nothing implicit about De Palma's film, which mixes documentary footage with the fictional diary of an army unit's experiences, culminating in a well-documented case of rape and murder.

He has one of the soldiers making the video diary, embedded members of the press rather ludicrously adding to the scene, and Iraqis telling their sad stories, too.

The war, he says, has been "redacted", or edited down by America's corporate media and Americans should now recognise that fact.

He hopes these images, fact or fiction, will tell the bitter truth, as his earlier Hi, Mom! did about the Vietnam War.