Crowe directs ambitious but uneven ‘Water Diviner’
THE WASHINGTON POST
Give Russell Crowe points for ambition. The Oscarwinning actor keeps upping the ante in his directorial debut, “The Water Diviner,” tackling a tricky story of postWorld War I reconciliation with a canvas large enough to encompass generous dollops of romanticism, adventure, melodramatic sentiment and mysticism.
Working with an at times wincingly unsubtle script by Andrew Knight and Andrew Anastasios, he has packed so much into this movie that the entire enterprise often seems about to collapse from its own aspirational weight. Crowe clearly seeks to return to classic storytelling values with this sweeping-yet-intimate, serious-yet-swashbuckling, hither-yet-thither picaresque; that he succeeds only part of the time shouldn’t detract from the worthiness of his mission.
“The Water Diviner” begins in 1915, several months after Allied forces from Australia and New Zealand invaded the Turkish peninsula known as Gallipoli; in the last throes of that notoriously vicious battle, three brothers are felled by enemy fire. The story then jumps to four years later, when the soldiers’ father, Joshua Connor — played by Crowe with sturdy, soulful understatement — is still trying to rebuild his life as well as manage the lingering grief of his wife, Eliza (Jacqueline McKenzie).
Riven by guilt for unthinkingly sending his sons to their doom, determined to give them the Catholic burial his wife has longed for, Connor travels to Turkey to find the boys’ remains and finally carry them back home. Through a series of encounters — with a cheeky Istanbul urchin and his pretty mother, with snippy British military bosses and a dignified Turkish major and, finally, with the members of Turkey’s burgeoning postwar nationalist movement — Connor comes to grips with trauma, closure and multicultural sensitivity long before those concepts would be household words.
Handsomely filmed in tones reminiscent of handtinted postcards, graced with stirring, carefully stage-managed images of vast Australian horizons, Istanbul’s Blue Mosque and denuded Turkish battlefields, “The Water Diviner” has clearly been made with care and a tasteful eye. As the erstwhile enemy whom Connor befriends, Yilmaz Erdogan brings sad-eyed, silken-voiced alertness to his role as a battle-weary leader who, when observing his countrymen escaping Greek forces who have recently invaded Anatolia, notes that Turkey now seems to be “constantly at war.” (Conveniently left out of “The Water Diviner’s” narrative is any mention of the assassinations, mass murders and deportations of Armenians that coincided with the Gallipoli invasion — both of whose 100-year anniversaries coincide with the release of the movie.)
Larding his story with plenty of flashbacks of brutal hand-tohand combat and inestimable suffering, Crowe also squeezes in a love interest, in the form of a hotel-keeper played by Olga Kurylenko, who is inarguably lissome and lovely but whose storyline often feels like a patronizing digression. Add several scenes of old-school derring-do — including some incident-packed chase and fight sequences — and “The Water Diviner” begins to feel less organic than catered from an ordering menu of movie cliches.
That’s never truer than when a stocky but still charismatic Crowe puts himself squarely in the middle of the action, his character’s native quietude seamlessly giving way to gallant physical heroics. Viewers can decide for themselves whether it was fate or the director’s prerogative at work when, in the film’s climactic scene, Crowe literally rides to the rescue on — what else? — a fittingly dashing white horse.