I didn't get into this in my review of In the Valley of Elah, but the title of the film has provoked a fair amount of head-scratching, even among some of the country's smartest film critics. Around the midpoint of the film, crusty old Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones) is asked to tell a bedtime story to the young son of Detective Sanders (Charlize Theron). What he tells the boy is the tale of David and Goliath, whose battle, he explains, took place in the Valley of Elah. The moral: "That's how you fight monsters. You lure them in close to you. You look them in the eye. And you smack them down." How exactly does this parable fit with writer-director Paul Haggis anti-war message? David Edelstein asked the obvious question: "Are the American soldiers or the Iraqis meant to be David? Or are the Davids the Americans at home-the ones who need to confront a ruthless and multi-tentacled administration?" David Denby takes a slightly different tack: "The title, I think, is partly ironic. David fought Goliath in the Valley of Elah. Hank sees himself as a latter-day David, slaying monsters, and this is a view that he has clearly passed on to his son, but the movie suggests something else-that Hank's notion of military uprightness has vanished, and America, including Mike, has become monstrous." If I read him correctly, I think Denby is pointing in more or less the right direction. The title is not, as one might first infer, a metaphor for Iraq--no one in the film is meant to be David or Goliath. Rather, the story of David is the kind of heroic myth that one generation of men hands down to the next to teach them about the glory of righteous combat. Hanks had surely told it to his boys (both of whom joined the Army and ultimately wound up dead as a result), and now he's telling it to Sanders's son. At the end of the film, she tells Hank that her boy has become obsessed with the story and now wants a slingshot, and the two laugh that, well, at least that's better than a BB gun. But of course the point is that one day soon enough he'll want a BB gun, and then a rifle, and then someday perhaps he'll enlist to become one of the doomed young boys sent off to war who populate Haggis's dour, one-note film. On one level, I think this subtext makes Haggis's film a bit more interesting by broadening his critique: He's casting a jaundiced eye not merely on one particular, futile war but on War itself, on the myths and metaphors handing down over the ages to persuade men to go kill or be killed on behalf of tribe or nation or God. The problem is that almost everything else in the film undercuts this broader reading. Again and again, Haggis makes the point that Iraq is different, somehow uniquely ignoble and soul-killing. Hank's understanding of what war does to soldiers and what it can make them do--an understanding he evidently developed in Vietnam--is repeatedly shown to be obsolete, a vestige of a more honorable age, inadequate to deciphering the monstrosities of the Iraq war. It's a shame, in a way, that the most subtle element of Haggis's film may be its contradictory, nearly indecipherable title. --Christopher Orr