What career Army officer Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones) uncovers in his quest to find the killer of his son profoundly alters his view of himself, of the service to which he devoted his entire life, and of the country he once believed in unquestioningly. What he finds is clear evidence that the son he knew when Mike went off to fight in Iraq had died a long time before his physical body was stabbed and hacked and left for animals to forage in a forlorn field in New Mexico. Writer/director Paul Haggis' In the Valley of Elah was THE MOST IMPORTANT AMERICAN FILM RELEASED IN 2007. It is a remarkable and unnerving experience by a two-time Oscar-winning screenwriter (Million Dollar Baby, Crash) that will likely be totally ignored by the people who should see it the most. The movie deals with a subject that America, barely coping with the disastrous war in Iraq, hasn't even begun to fully experience yet -- the trauma and the dehumanization that our soldiers will inevitably have suffered in the Middle East. It lies coiled like a nest of startled vipers, Haggis argues eloquently here -- and when it strikes in all of its fury, it may rival the horror of the war itself.