The Deerfields are notified that their son, Mike, just back from Iraq, has gone AWOL. Hank informs his wife (Susan Sarandon). Then, the soldier from Tennessee, a former military policeman, hops into his pickup for the long drive to Fort Rudd in New Mexico. He drives through the neon wilderness where his search for his soldier son makes him reconsider his role as a soldier father.
In New Mexico, while civilian and military authorities engage in a jurisdictional skirmish over accountability, Hank conducts his own investigation into his son's disappearance.
Stonewalled by Mike's squad mates and the officer in charge (Jason Patric), Hank finds an unlikely ally in a detective (Charlize Theron), a single mother who shares his dour professionalism, his parental duty, and his growing horror at the corruption of values dearly held.
Haggis, the Canadian-born screenwriter of the powerfully underplayed Million Dollar Baby and writer/director of the pyrotechnic and overwrought Crash, wisely scales his film to Jones' undemonstrative performance, his words rationed as strictly as bullets during a siege. Jones contains Hank's emotions so that the audience feels them most keenly.
The film follows the familiar structure of a police procedural, each piece of new evidence pointing to a different individual culprit. This is the foreground of Haggis' film. But background, and backstory, looms.
With casualty reports on the radio and combat footage on TV in the forlorn diners where Hank eats, the war is like the elevator music no longer heard. Haggis' objective is to turn up the volume, coaxing his characters (and the audience) to more carefully listen to the conflict that they, and we, have tuned out.
