Canter Bridge

This grim and superbly casted film reminds its viewer that war isn’t over when the boys come home. Too often, it gets inside the boys and lurches on in quiet, painful and sometimes devastating directions.

Yet Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron have not lent their formidable gifts to a monotone anti-war flick. The film’s focus does not ascend to the larger question of the war in Iraq and its justification or the absence thereof. The lens is far more personal than that. A gritty man’s son has been inexplicably murdered. The film opens with the deep irony that Jones’ Hank Deerfield knew where his soldier son was when he was in far-away Iraq, but the boy goes missing immediately upon his return to the US.

Susan Sarandon’s Joan Deerfield appears relatively briefly, but long enough for her powerful presence to communicate a mother’s calamitous grief in spades.

It is largely up to Jones’ Deerfield and Theron’s underrated Detective Emily Sanders to provide the grim grit and relentless investigative rigor that will not let things go until solved. The other characters in this drama would prefer to sweep things under the rug, let sleeping dogs lie, and otherwise not get to the awful bottom of a returned platoon that has turned in upon itself.

This is not an easy film to watch. In this reviewer’s eyes, it chooses not to wave flags for or against the larger arguments of war. It simply pounds the emotional pavement relentlessly until a crime is solved and a soldier’s disappearance is explained. That’s not everything. But that’s something.