The Water Diviner taps into tears
Strong men do cry, as Russell Crowe plainly exhibits
The Water Diviner Rating: 1/2 out of 5 Directed by: Russell Crowe Starring: Russell Crowe, Olga Kurylenko, Jai Courtney Running time: 111 minutes
There’s just enough of a high-gloss historical sheen that you probably couldn’t make the charge of vanity project stick, but Russell Crowe, the director, sure does find an awful lot of upstanding, stirring and utterly manly things for Russell Crowe, the actor, to do in The Water Diviner.
He tears across fields on horses, racing to save his boys from a sandstorm. He fights off a group of Greek marauders. He tousles the hair of an adorable Turkish boy, becoming a fatherly figure in less than two full days. He runs across rooftops and dives into rushing waters.
This is truly a story about the wounds that wars leave, even on those who don’t fight in them — and all the lengths to which Crowe will go to convince you that strong men also cry.
We first meet Crowe’s Connor — I’m not sure he’s ever really addressed by that name, so I’m just going to keep calling him Crowe, because I think he’d like it that way. Anyway, we first meet Crowe pulling off the water-finding trick of the title, and then making his way back to a homestead filled with freerange crazy. The grief of losing three sons to the Battle of Gallipoli has left Crowe’s beloved wife batty, and insisting he read The Arabian Nights to their nonexistent boys. You can tell by the way he screws up his face but then falls asleep with their picture in his hand, he thinks all this sadness is too much, and yet he feels it, too.
When his wife finally decides that grief is too much after nearly 35 seconds of screen time, he makes a graveside promise to find and return her boys — no small commitment given they are on the other side of the world, and scattered among one of the deadliest stretches of ground in a war that perfected industrialized kill zones. Once he gets past the stuffy British bureaucracy, all it takes is his mystical gift for finding things — dead sons are 65 per cent water, after all — to accomplish what a literal platoon of ANZAC soldiers have yet to do. Except one of the boys turns out to be missing, and possibly alive.
Through all this sensitive fatherly drama, Crowe is also getting to know the locals. Major Hasan (Yilmaz Erdogan) was one of the rival commanders in the field where his son died, but their mutual, manly respect convinces them to let bygones be bygones, and help a father out. Ayshe (Olga Kurylenko, technically Ukrainian, but that’s just across the Black Sea, and those doe eyes speak a universal language), works the desk at the hotel Crowe stays at, and is the mother of that adorable moppet he’s always tousling, whose father died at Gallipoli, too.
As a series of solemn nods and pofaced speeches teach us, everyone loses in war. Sometimes, though, if your man is just manly enough and your Turkish hostess is just Ukrainian enough, you might be able to find something in that loss. Cue music swells.
The Water Diviner is a film that knows how important it is, and takes pains to remind you about how solemn all these events are. Even Crowe’s fleeting moments of levity are delivered with all the zip of a painting of Jesus ministering to lepers. It’s so concerned with making a solemn statement about the horrors of war, and showing off Russell Crowe’s sensitive face, it never really bothers to liven things up with actual touches of humanity. Wistful gazes into the distance are its default response to everything, as though the characters, like the audience, are hoping something more interesting is coming across the horizon.
It’s less a moving story than a story that knows how to look like a moving story. And if Crowe should happen to get a couple ego-burnishing moments while it all goes down, well, what the hell do we fight all those wars for, anyway?