Media Room

If you want to catch up on some of the Oscar-nominated films before and after the big show Sunday night, you’re in luck — studios are releasing many of these films in the weeks surrounding the ceremony.

In the Valley of Elah (Warner Home Video, $27.95 for DVD, $35.99 for Blu-ray), for example, has the performance that got Tommy Lee Jones a best actor nomination.

Its writer-director, Paul Haggis, is one of the best known progressives in Hollywood. “I’m a little left of Mao,” he readily said during an interview in the District last year.

So, critics expected “In the Valley of Elah” to serve as his artistic riposte against the war. The film stars Mr. Jones as Hank Deerfield, a retired Army sergeant investigating both the murder of his son, who disappeared after returning home from a tour of duty in Iraq, and what his son saw while serving. In “Elah,” however, Mr. Haggis focuses not on why we’re in the war but rather on the people fighting it.

Mr. Haggis wrote two best picture Oscar-winners back to back, 2004’s “Million Dollar Baby” and “Crash” the next year, which he also directed. Puffing away on Native American Spirit cigarettes — polite to a fault, he asked for permission first — the Canadian-born director says the idea for “Elah” came before he had even released “Crash.”

“It started with some troubling videos I started seeing on the Internet that were getting around the official war censorship, which we have in all wars,” he says. One featured images of buildings blowing up and surgical strikes played over the song “We Will Rock You,” followed by a shot of a young man mugging for the camera with his arm around a burned-up corpse.

“I was so shocked by this,” Mr. Haggis continues. “You step foot in the sand over there, you’re a hero as far as I’m concerned. And yet, something’s happening.”

He began digging around, wondering if there might be a movie in it. “I start with a question, something that bothers me, and I don’t necessarily know what it is I’m going to do, or I might do nothing.”

Mr. Haggis listened to hundreds of veterans, and his film is inspired by a true story. “Reports are coming back about what our troops are facing over there, and I didn’t know what I would do in that situation,” he says.

Insurgents will send a child to stop a convoy so they can blow it up. When you come across a child who won’t move, what do you do?

“I don’t care about bad people and the bad decisions they make. I care about good people and the right decisions they make and how those right decisions will haunt you,” Mr. Haggis says.

And in the course of his research, the director found that many veterans are haunted.

“I consider myself a patriot. I love this country,” says Mr. Haggis, a dual-citizen who moved to the U.S. from Canada 30 years ago. He notes that if, as the Pentagon says, one in six Iraq war veterans has post-traumatic stress syndrome, thousands of young men and women have been deeply affected by the war but are being virtually ignored.

“We seem to be betraying the men while driving around with bumper stickers saying, ‘Support our troops.’ Something’s desperately wrong,” he insists. “And so I tried to put my politics aside and say, ‘Have some responsibility.’ ”

Mr. Haggis would like to see politicians put politics aside, too. “I’m very much against this war. I have been from the beginning. But there are people who strongly believe that we’re there for the right reasons. I’m not going to tell them they’re idiots — these are smart people,” he says. “And look, the Democrats got us into Vietnam, one of the worst wars of all time. We forget this. Everybody thinks it was Nixon — not true. Kennedy, one of our greatest presidents, got us in there. LBJ escalated that war. Democrats are just as guilty as Republicans in this case. I fear that all these people are running around saying, ‘Let’s get the Democrats in office, and they’ll stop this war.’ Nonsense. I don’t think we can trust politicians, one group over another. Democrats love to look tough — that’s the one thing they get criticized on, so they’ll go to war just to look good.”

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