Near the beginning of “In the Valley of Elah,” Tommy Lee Jones’s character, Hank Deerfield, teaches an El Salvadoran man how to properly raise the American flag and informs him that hoisting it upside down is an international distress signal, which means “come save our a—- because we don’t have a prayer in hell.”

When Hank inevitably hoists the flag upside down, he duct tapes it in place, which makes the El Salvadoran happy. “That’s easier,” he intones. It is a telling statement on this film, by the director Paul Haggis, about reverse patriotism. It’s a lot easier not having to bother to lift and lower the flag everyday.

Mr. Haggis’s films don’t master in subtlety. His 2004 Oscar winner, “Crash,” could have been subtitled, “Everyone’s a little bit racist,” and “In the Valley of Elah” scatters the blame for the failures in Iraq equidistantly.

From the beginning it’s clear that Hank’s search for his missing son, a U.S. Army soldier, is not going to end well. President Bush’s speeches, heard from the background, foreshadow failure, and supposed camera phone video snapshots of the war on the ground paint a picture of warped heroism. We’re told “they shouldn’t send heroes to Iraq” as the film shows what happens to heroes exposed to the turmoil over there. “In the Valley of Elah” is hard at work uncovering the implicit corruption of war and trying to prove that Iraq is a different breed of military operation. As Hank’s retired, dutiful soldier learns of the pressures and failings that have led to a military composed of warped villains and man-child heroics, the foundations of his previously stable worldview begin to crumble.

Based on an investigative piece by Mike Shoal (who also helped with the script) in Playboy magazine on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, “In the Valley of Elah” tries to tackle the ineptitude of the Iraq war from the point of view of the destroyed soldier.

But not content to simply investigate the re-acclamation of soldiers returning from the horrors of war, Mr. Haggis has created a murder mystery for Hank, an adept retired Army detective, to unravel. Inhibited by the Army’s inexplicable cover-up and aided only slightly by a police detective named Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron), Hank is desperate to uncover the truth behind his son’s disappearance.

After being contacted by the military about his son’s AWOL status shortly after Mike (Jonathan Tucker) returned from his tour of duty in Iraq, Hank arrives at his son’s base looking for answers. He encounters Detective Sanders, and the two embark on the kind of intergenerational cinematic puzzle-solving that is normally left to Morgan Freeman and Ashley Judd. As the two work against Sanders’s department and the expanding cover-up by the military, they move further away from the moral crux of the film — Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Mr. Haggis’s oppressive moral focus won him an Oscar for both “Crash” and “Million Dollar Baby,” and he tries the same approach here. But his obsession with exposing the kinks in the armor of heroism undermines the course of his film. The soldiers are all drug addicts and thrill seekers; an oversight by Emily leads to a murder; Hank has some racist issues he needs to work out, etc.

By the time Hank and Emily sort out their puzzle, it’s hard to tell whom to blame for all these high crimes and misdemeanors. The film’s high degree of moral outrage certainly falls on our country’s leaders, but it also comes down squarely on the shoulders of men willing to defend their country, and anyone naïve enough to have heroes in the first place.

Mr. Jones is unfailingly on-point in his depiction of a principled man from a forgotten era, and Ms. Theron does her best to keep up, but the emotional heft is missing from this anatomy of a murder. Susan Sarandon gives a powerful performance as Hank’s wife, who has lost both her sons to America’s wars, but Joan is only an occasional visitor in Hank’s world and is shuttled off as soon as the appeal to emotion has been completed.

The title of the film is taken from the valley in the Hebrew Bible where the young soldier David defeated the giant Goliath. Hank tells the story to Emily’s young son, David (Devin Brochu), to help him overcome his fears, but it is Hank’s antiquated moralism that is exposed here.

The film’s Web site synopsizes the story and then posits: “What the Bible doesn’t tell us is how many boys the king sent into the valley before him.” But in its indictment of the kingdom that disposes of soldiers for its cause, “In the Valley of Elah” sprays bullets far too broadly. In the end, it’s just throwing stones.