It’s November 2004 and the phone rings on Tommy Lee Jones’s bedside table “Your son has gone AWOL,” are the only words Jones, a decorated veteran, hears. When he calls to check the base where his son Michael Deerfield (Jonathan Tucker) has just come home and doesn’t get answers, Jones heads to the base to find them, while Deerfield’s mother (Susan Sarandon) stays home and worries. Enter Charlize Theron, an investigator for the police department (who takes on a Jodie Foster “Silence of the Lambs” look) and is not taken too seriously by her peers. She wants to help Jones after she learns the brutal truth. Theron has a history of these movies with women/men/hatred (“Monster”) and this one is no different seemingly stepped out from the set of “North Country” into this role. By the movies, end you realize it isn’t about being for the war or against the war, but a big statement about the damage the war inflicts on our boys coming home (which explains why a politically outspoken Sarandon signed up to play the mother). Director Paul Haggis follows up his brilliant “Crash” – trading in a movie on racism for a movie on war. There is superior acting here (to be considered come Oscar time) but in a movie that moves slowly and finally gains our interest in the final half hour of discovery. Three tiaras
