It seemed almost inevitable that a major motion picture would be released to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Gallipoli landings, that big and horrific juncture in Australian history. Despite having only directed a handful of short films and music documentaries, Russell Crowe was the guy to attempt it. With Peter Weir’s self-consciously mythological Gallipoli (1981) and New Zealand’s takeover of Chunuk Bair (1992), the conflict has already been immortalized in contemporary film.
Crowe’s feature debut strives to be less about the war itself and more about the impact it had on two societies, both of which were left without their young men and grappling with new identities. Crowe begins his picture from the viewpoint of a Turkish commander, Maj. Hasan (Ylmaz Erdoan, superb), leading his troops on a charge into no-man’s land only to discover the allied trenches empty and their ships disappearing across the sea, the shattered defenders’ moment of stunning success. Four years later, in the Australian outback, farmer Joshua Connor (Crowe) uses divining rods to locate water sources and builds a well that successfully hits water. Soon after, it is revealed that Connor lost three boys at Lone Pine during the Gallipoli Campaign, and his wife Eliza (Jacqueline McKenzie), who is still grieving, rebukes him before killing herself in the farm dam.
Connor packs up and flies to Turkey, determined to bring back the remains of his boys and bury them beside her, despite the local Catholic minister’s (Damon Herriman’s) haggling over granting her a suitable burial. Lt. Col. Cyril Hughes (Jai Courtney), an Australian soldier and former civil engineer who participated in the fight, leads a team to Gallipoli to rescue the allied dead for appropriate burial in an Imperial war cemetery, working with Hasan, who has been dispatched to assist with his battlefield experience.
When Connor first arrives in Istanbul, he is pursued by little Orhan (Dylan Georgiades), who takes his bag and leads him on a wild goose chase, determined to keep him in the hotel managed by his mother Ayshe (Olga Kurylenko) and her brother-in-law Omer (Steve Bastoni). Ayshe is skeptical of Connor since her musician husband died at Gallipoli, despite the fact that she still refers to herself as married and hasn’t informed Orhan that his father is dead; in the meantime, Omer is urging her to marry him and follow his brother’s less Europeanized habits.
When Connor runs into bureaucratic roadblocks on his way to the battlefield, Ayshe encourages him to hire a fishing boat to transport him there by water and drop him down on the shore, where he hounds the irritated but impressed troops to aid him in his mission. However, Hasan withdraws his assistance when turbulence pervades his besieged country, with Turkish nationalism on the rise and aimed at the occupying British, while Greek partisans wage battle.
The Water Diviner would be as magnificent as it plainly aspires to be if pure intentions were art. They aren’t, and it isn’t. The Water Diviner aspires to be both a cultural memorial and a revisionist work, considering the battle as a hellish zone of moral nullity rather than an ennobling crucible and taking seriously the Turkish side of the war, which is rarely considered in the official mythology of Gallipoli as held in Australia (largely depicted as an anonymous, almost abstract threat in Weir’s film, for example), for whom the ANZACs were an invading host Crowe’s picture also aspires to be a huge, entertaining, old-fashioned epic narrative of suffering, quest, and reward.
That’s not inherently a bad thing; in fact, it’s the kind of concept that many a great director in the past would have jumped upon. By comparing the personal pain of an Australian parent with the political turbulence of Turkey in defeat, confronted with major changes of view and position in the world, the film at least intelligibly presents the internal and exterior challenges of coming to grips with the war. Crowe, as one would expect from an actor turned director, excels at shaping performances. Crowe’s stock-in-trade as an actor has long been portraying physically big guys with a startling intellect that they can’t always wield as well as their muscles, a theme he returns to here. He’s most confident in presenting men and women grappling with their dualism, grief, and life spirit and in delivering moments of low-key humanism, such as a slightly thrilling celebration of purpose and camaraderie among Hasan’s Kemalist cadre, which Connor observes with a mix of bemusement and joy.
Crowe pays homage to his breakout performance in Romper Stomper (1992) by casting McKenzie, his co-star in that film, as Connor’s doomed wife. The Water Diviner may also be seen as an examination of his own situation as a globetrotter eager to return home and find a religious faith. Crowe, to his credit, seems to have picked up some tips from some of the better filmmakers with whom he’s spent time over the years. Thematically, the cynical attitude toward social and religious pieties, as well as the openness to the transformative energy of cross-cultural communication even in the midst of conflict, call to mind Ridley Scott, both visually in the clean yet lustrous expanses of his widescreen framing and also in the thematic stresses, recalling Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (2005).
Crowe plies certain patches of powerful cinematic beauty with stunningly colorful and clear images, alive to a crucial visual thesis presenting individuals stuck between longing for the transcendent and the brutal reality of earth and flesh, due in large part to Andrew Lesnie’s outstanding photography. This idea is suggested in early shots of Crowe immersed in the water he releases from the red soil, and it recurs throughout the film in beatific flashes, as his wife wafts ghostly through his living room to kiss him before dying, in the sight of whirling dervishes in lucid shafts of light trying to catch bliss, paintbrushes daubing at decaying religious art, and even in the sight of Connor approaching the Gallipoli shore in a fishing
As Connor’s inexplicable skill with water matures into a superhuman feeling of confidence in the quest for his lost sons, such suggestions of pseudo-mystical foundations become disturbingly tangible. Crowe presents this perspective without expanding on it, without even a word to clarify his own interpretation of such a gift, and although it gives the film its title, it is only a plot device. Crowe aims to present a terrible view of war, concluding a well-handled remembrance of intense battle with the horrible sight of three bullet-riddled brothers laying together, one with his face blown off, one wheezing in animalistic misery for hours, and the third forced to lie helplessly listening.
But, as he presents gallant and patriotic Turks versus sleazy Greek robbers, Crowe rapidly exposes this position as a ruse, making us root for Connor as he switches sides. As captivating as certain scenes are, Crowe’s inexperienced touch is often exposed, wavering between extremes of artfulness and clumsiness. There are two banalities for every moment Crowe handles well, as he gives multiple patches of severely confusing narrative in which relatively basic plot developments are badly presented. With startling awkwardness, he jumps in and out of memories. Crowe regretfully avoided crafting a simpler, more powerful evocation of zones of flux between death and life force, instead churning out a tale with much too much time for clichéd story beats and cornball cues, undercutting his finer efforts.
The main issue is the writing, written by TV writers Andrew Knight and Andrew Anastasios, which is wide and sarcastic when it isn’t a jumble of clichés. Too many sequences are lifted from elsewhere, and the plot is predictable in a way that owes more to the ease of formula than to the fatefulness of myth. There can only be one ending from the moment Connor meets Ayshe, occasionally evoking a drizzly remake of Crowe’s romance with Marion Cotillard in, of all things, A Good Year (2006), mixed with one of those thorny cross-cultural courtships like Ken Loach’s Ae Fond Kiss… (2004), where there will be inevitable clashes with forbidding relatives and angry miscommunication to stall the plot.
To keep the love need thwarted long enough, Crowe, Knight, and Anastasios hurl every piece of emotional furniture, from Ayshe’s snippy denial of her husband’s death to Omer’s desire to marry her and the obligatory “You know nothing!” speech all invader heroes must go through. When Connor, Ayesha, and Orhan splash water on each other, it signals the beginning of a new family unit. I’m not joking. By having Omer reveal himself to be a sleazy jerk who beats up Ayesha and informs Orhan about his father’s fate in the war out of vengeance, the screenplay eliminates the possible cultural complexity involved in Connor’s fumbling between Ayesha and Omer. Don’t even ask me what the heck is going on with Ayshe’s hotel’s resident hooker (Isabel Lucas), whose immoral career seems to not bother anybody despite all the worries about propriety: she’s ultimately spotted manning the front desk.
The film also subverts its own original aim by revealing that the assumption that all three of Connor’s boys perished at Lone Pine was incorrect; as a result, we go from a depiction of a man attempting to come to terms with unfathomable grief to a more typical story of hope and redemption. Arthur (Ryan Corr), one of Connor’s lads, survived and was transferred to a POW camp, but he appears to have gone in the meantime. Aside from some brief, musty, perplexing transitions to sequences of Connor reading Arabian Nights to them as tiny boys or saving them from a billowing sandstorm, and a vignette of Connor extracting a vow from Arthur to return his siblings home, we get little depiction of Connor’s kids.
Arthur’s obvious talent for drawing proves to be a significant storyline point, but it isn’t revealed until it’s too late in the story. Crowe would rather spend time caricaturing the few British officers in the picture in a way that recalls the corny, manipulative aspect of many Australian New Wave films that aimed to expose British usage of Australians as cannon fodder. He casts Capt. Brindley (Dan Wyllie) as a petty evil person who sees the need to deploy armed men to Turkey to ensure that a harmless citizen escapes, for no other purpose than to add suspense to the story, no matter how absurd or unneeded. After discovering the skeleton of one of Hasan’s sons with a gunshot wound that signals execution, Connor attempts to assault him. This outburst of very messy, visceral passion is swiftly quelled—much too fast—and Connor and Hasan instead form a hesitant, then powerful, amity.
In the middle of a conflict with the Greeks, Connor learns of the growing movement in favor of Mustafa Kemal and finally joins Hasan, his faithful sergeant Jemal (Cem Ylmaz), and his troops aboard a train as they journey to face marauding Greek partisans in the search for Arthur. All of this goes a little too far in terms of probability, portraying forgiveness and new friendship glibly and straining to work in some third act action. This pays off in an achingly ridiculous sequence in which Connor demonstrates that he has packed his cricket bat for no reason other than to allow Crowe to perform a feel-good interlude with Connor teaching Turks how to play. Crowe goes one step further by having Connor rescue Hasan and Jemal by creeping up on their Greek kidnappers and clubbing them with the bat.
The Water Diviner comes dangerously close to reaching the same degree of cripplingly dumb audience pandering as Baz Luhrmann’s not-so-distant take on Australian mythology, Australia (2008). Let’s not go too far into the film’s period political notion—the arrival of a swaggering Greek partisan leader as a last-minute villain would be amusing if it didn’t touch on some agonizing history for the purpose of cheap melodrama. The professionalism of the ensemble, the striking aspects of Lesnie’s photography, and Crowe’s ability to maintain a tone of seriousness despite everything contribute to the film’s watchability.
