Crowe elevates ‘Water Diviner’
Russell Crowe has worked for — and with — some of the most accomplished directors in the world, including Ridley Scott, Ron Howard, Michael Mann, Peter Weir and Paul Haggis, some more than once.
So it should come as no surprise that he comfortably slides into the director’s chair for “The Water Diviner,” in which he also stars. It has moments guaranteed to move you to tears or gladden your heart, sweeping expanses of skies blue, rosy pink or roiling with a deadly dust storm that chases three little boys like a vengeful villain, and the simple story of a father trying to lay his sons to rest.
Mr. Crowe plays Australian farmer Joshua Connor who, in 1919, goes to find the remains of his three missing sons who fought against the Turks in the Battle of Gallipoli.
The failure of the boys to come home after World War I sent his wife round the bend. When he returns from triumphantly finding water deep below the surface — he is the water diviner of the title — she tells him the boys are in bed waiting for him to read their favorite story, “Arabian Nights.” He takes the book into the room where three empty beds with three neatly folded sets of pajamas wait for the longabsent occupants.
Connor, who has sacrificed his family for “king and country,” decides to try to locate his offspring, a seemingly impossible quest that takes him to Istanbul and beyond. He encounters those in mourning, denial, anger or hope, along with unlikely allies, such as Major Hasan (Yilmaz Erdogan), a Turkish officer.
When Connor tells a hotel operator, Ayshe (Olga Kurylenko), that he is on the way to Gallipoli, she curtly suggests, “There’s nothing there but ghosts.” Gallipoli is eight square miles of collapsed trenches, white crosses and unidentified bodies reduced to dusty bones and skulls along the steep hills but Connor will have no peace until his sons do.
Writers Andrew Knight and Andrew Anastasios were inspired by a line in a longago letter about Gallipoli that said, “One old chap managed to get here from Australia looking for his son’s grave.” The movie brings surprises and some developments you can read like the remains of a cup of coffee served in the Istanbul hotel.
“The Water Diviner,” which plays to Mr. Crowe’s acting strengths and role as a real-life dad, is an old-fashioned epic with music that swells as dialogue recedes, men thundering across the landscape on horseback, a rare view inside Istanbul’s Blue Mosque and brief flashbacks depicting the horrors of war. In one chilling scene, a man who is bleeding to death moans in an involuntary, almost inhuman way.
The movie won three Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Awards (it shared best picture with “Babadook”). Many Americans probably learned about Gallipoli in the 1981 movie of the same name starring Mel Gibson, so while some times and places are identified on screen, you may feel a little lost when it comes to geography, politics and alliances.
So this comes courtesy of a 2002 Associated Press story about the death of the last Australian known to have fought in the Gallipoli campaign: Australian and New Zealand volunteers formed the backbone of a 200,000-man Britishled army that landed at Gallipoli in a failed attempt to capture Istanbul and knock the German-allied Ottoman Empire out of the war.
One million men fought in the campaign, which Turkish forces turned into a frustrating nine-month battle of attrition. The Allies recorded 55,000 killed, 10,000 missing and 21,000 dead of disease, mainly dysentery. Turkish casualties were estimated at 250,000.
“The Water Diviner,” opening only at AMC-Loews at the Waterfront, obviously will resonate in a different way for Australians and others (look up the April 19 Next Page piece in the PG by Hazel Cope about her late father-inlaw) but it marks the arrival of Mr. Crowe as a feature film director. And if he gives himself most of the showstopping moments, well, he knows a talent and box-office draw when he sees it.