Movie Review: 'The Water Diviner'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- With a couple of dozen lead roles, an Oscar for Gladiator, and nominations for The Insider and A Beautiful Mind, Russell Crowe has long since established himself as a world-class screen actor.
With The Water Diviner, the New Zealand-born-and-Australia-bred Crowe joins the ranks of high-profile movie actors who have transitioned into the director's chair -- such as Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford, Kevin Costner, Warren Beatty, Barbra Streisand, Sean Penn, Angelina Jolie, and Ben Affleck.
The Water Diviner is a fictionalized, handsomely shot historical drama with an antiwar undercurrent that did well in Australia's Academy Awards, sharing the prize for best film with The Babadook.
The screenplay by Andrew Anastasios and Andrew Knight, based on a true story, opens in 1919, four years after the disastrous Australian defeat at the World War I battle of Gallipoli, during which Great Britain and its allies invaded Turkey.
Crowe plays Australian farmer Joshua Connor, who is also a "water diviner" -– that is, with the help of divining rods and his presumably psychic powers, he can locate water sources and then dig wells.
One day, he returns home to his bereaved wife, Eliza (Jacqueline McKenzie), who reports momentous news to him that Joshua knows occurred five years ago: that all three of their sons, Art (Jackie Patterson), Edward (James Fraser), and Henry (Ben O'Toole) have left to join the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) to serve at the Battle of Gallipoli.
In truth, none of their sons returned from war and all three were presumed dead.
It is not long before Eliza is so overcome with grief that she takes her own life, at which point a shaken Joshua vows, as a pledge to Eliza, that, however impossible a needles-in-a-haystack task it might seem, he will locate his sons' bodies and bring them home to be buried alongside their mother.
Connor travels to Turkey, where he stays in an Istanbul hotel run by the recently widowed Ayshe, played by Olga Kurylenko, bonds with a Turkish officer (Yilmaz Erdogan) who may have had something to do with his sons' deaths, becomes involved with the Turkish war of independence, and encounters all kinds of resistance in his attempts to discover the fates and locate the whereabouts of the remains of his sons, who are somewhere among the 10,000 Australians and 70,000 Turks killed during the conflict.
The Water Diviner -- recalling Peter Weir's fine 1981 film, Gallipoli, with Mel Gibson -- is nothing if not ambitious, especially for what is essentially a first-time director (Crowe has previously directed a documentary about his band and two short subjects), using flashbacks to convey the Connors' home life during much happier times as well as the brutality and tragedy of warfare.
The admixture of battle, romance, history, and domestic melodrama isn't always smooth and graceful: it often seems as if director Crowe has a bit too much on his plate.
But he gets a lead performance –- from himself, it just so happens –- that is a full-bodied portrait of a guy whose well-intentioned quest is admirable but who also realizes and acknowledges that somehow his behavior has contributed to the level of tragedy he now has to endure.
So we'll locate 2½ stars out of 4 for this uneven but admirable period epic. The Water Diviner falls short of divine, but it's still something to Crowe about.