Russell Crowe stars as a man searching for his sons after the Battle of Gallipoli.
Russell Crowe’s feature directorial debut, “The Water Diviner,” is a somber historical fiction about the aftermath of World War I’s Gallipoli campaign, and everyone in it looks haunted and humbled. We will never know what they were like before the war, before they knew better, before they knew how vulnerable they were, and before they knew to think less highly of themselves. Crowe’s direction captures this mood across all the performances, of people damaged and yet elevated, transformed against their will.
The movie comes together from several directions and takes time to cohere, but it builds to a tense emotional place. It begins behind the Turkish lines, in the last battle of the campaign, and then shifts to Australia four years later, to the sight of a man trying to find a source of water for his dusty farm. We soon discover that this man, Connor (Crowe), lost three sons at Gallipoli and that his wife has gone mad from grief. As was the case of so many Great War casualties, the sons’ remains were never located.
“The Water Diviner,” based on the novel by Andrew Anastasios and Meaghan Wilson-Anastasios, tells the story of Connor’s journey to Istanbul and Gallipoli and his efforts to find his sons’ bodies and return them to Australia. Australia is brown and dusty, but Istanbul is color and street life, the Blue Mosque and the call to prayer. As for Gallipoli, it’s a study in contrasts. Turn one way, and the sea views are stunning. Look the other way, and it’s absolute desolation, a thin cover of wreckage over a mass grave.
Of course, as a civilian, Connor can’t get near anything, but there is something about him that’s too substantial to dismiss. He doesn’t seem like a man who will be dissuaded, or who should be. Here, again, Crowe shows he’s an intelligent director of himself. His aura of purpose and seriousness isn’t overplayed, and his character is hardly irresistible to everyone. But we do believe in his essential depth, brought about by suffering, which others in the same condition can perceive.
One of those people is Major Hasan (Yilmaz Erdogan), the commander who won the battle but lost the war and is now assisting his former adversaries in locating the bodies. It’s hard to say what it is Erdogan does — what it is about this Turkish actor that allows us to read worlds of insight into his stillness — but he is remarkable, either a great actor or a gifted presence, or both. The emerging connection between Connor and the man who may be responsible for the death of his sons is one of the film’s deepening riches.
The other is Connor’s gradual affection for Ayshe, a widow who lost her husband at Gallipoli and now runs the hotel that Connor stays in. Olga Kurylenko has been largely unchallenged in her screen career, either decorative or, as in “To the Wonder,” a pawn in a director’s grand design. Crowe gives her room to breathe. He makes her at least an equal in their two-person encounters, and she emerges as a leading lady of intelligence and force.
“The Water Diviner” is not the easiest movie to love, with its somber atmosphere and unwelcome movements back and forth from the post-war period back to the war. But it’s an easy film to respect and, as it plays on, to care about and enjoy. It should be said that the battle scenes are uncompromising in their grimness — a split-second sight of a soldier trembling after his legs are blown off lingers in the mind. Crowe is not trying to dream up opportunities to throw himself another close-up. He’s a genuine director.