Real men do cry, Crowe shows
Film depicts grief of war, with little humanity
THE WATER DIVINER
1/2
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 a 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.
I’m not sure Crowe’s Connor is ever really addressed by that name, so I’m just going to keep calling him Crowe. We first meet Crowe pulling off the water-finding trick of the title, and then making his way back to a homestead filled with free-range 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.
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 Crowe 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.
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.