Acclaimed Hollywood film is based on a Fil-Am soldier’s death
In the Valley of Elah is about a father’s search for closure in the mysterious death of his son.
Academy winners Tommy Lee Jones, Susan Sarandon and Charlize Theron star in this new Hollywood film inspired by the life and death of Filipino-American soldier Richard Thomas Ong Davis.
In the Valley of Elah is based on the case of Specialist Richard Davis, who, after returning from Iraq, was found dead of multiple stab wounds four summers ago. Richard’s father Lanny Davis, a former military police officer, mounted his own investigation into the crime.
Richard Davis joined the military in 1998, at the age of 19, following in his parents’ footsteps. His mother Remy, who hails from Cagayan Valley in the Philippines, was an Army medic while his father spent 20 years in the Army, serving tours in Korea and Vietnam as a combat military policeman.
Richard served in Bosnia for his first assignment, and was sent to Iraq when the United States invaded the country in 2003.He survived the war in Iraq, where he turned 25 during the march to Baghdad, only to be murdered after celebrating his homecoming at a bar near Ft. Benning in Georgia.
He had mysteriously disappeared two days after his return. His body, pared down to almost a skeleton when investigators found it four months later, was hidden in the woods. Four members from his own infantry unit were arrested for the crime.
Written and directed by Paul Haggis – the writer behind Best Picture Oscar winners Million Dollar Baby and Crash, In the Valley of Elah is “a film masquerading as a murder mystery that slowly turns into a moral mystery.”
How did Haggis get inspired by the Davis case? “In the spring of 2004, I had just finished making my first film as a director and was looking for my second. I read Mark Boal’s article Death and Dishonor. The story of Lanny Davis’ search for his missing son, Specialist Richard Davis, made my heart stop. I began doing a lot of reading – everything from small town newspaper articles to blogs that soldiers were writing about their experiences in Iraq. I talked to vets who’d just returned and some on their way back.”
Entertainment Weekly calls it “the first Hollywood Iraq movie to remind me of a Vietnam film like Coming Home, and it does more than disturb. It scalds, moves, and heals.”
Read the plot and movie review here.
[sources:inquirer;entertainment weekly;image]
Tags: richard thomas ong davis, iraq, movie, hollywood, filipino-american, soldier, in the valley of elah, paul haggis, Tommy Lee Jones, Charlize Theron, Susan Sarandon
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