Review: The Water Diviner
"One old chap managed to get here from Australia, looking for his son's grave." One can see how that sentence, taken from a letter written by Cyril Hughes, a high-ranking officer in charge with recovering and burying the bodies of the Australian soldiers from the battlefields, sparked a flame in writer Andrew Anastasios' imagination. Those words, themselves an encapsulation of any war's effect on those left behind, form the spine of Russell Crowe's rousing directorial debut, The Water Diviner.
In many respects, the WW1 battles at Gallipoli, a peninsula in the Ottoman Empire, could be likened to the Vietnam War. Tens of thousands of Australian and New Zealand soldiers' lives were sacrificed in what many described as dirty little trench wars. It was a loss of innocence, one that very much forged the Australian identity. Peter Weir's acclaimed 1981 Gallipoli, featuring a young Mel Gibson, movingly depicted the slow erosion of the ideals held by the plucky and courageous young men as they endured the hardships of war. The final frame of a soldier falling backwards as he's struck by gunfire is as iconic an image of death in wartime as Willem Dafoe's expiration in Platoon.
There is no such iconic moment in The Water Diviner, but it is hard to argue against the go-for-the-guts emotionalism of watching a young man lying on the bloodied dirt, listening to one brother emitting the most ghastly wails whilst the other brother wishes for their mother. The loss of those three boys still haunts their mother (Jacqueline McKenzie) four years on. Consumed by her anguish, she drowns herself. Her husband Joshua (Crowe) vows to find his sons and bring their bodies back home for burial.
He journeys to Constantinople, where ten-year-old Orhan (Dylan Georgiades) grabs his bag and leads him to the hotel run by his mother Ayshe (Olga Kurylenko) and uncle Omer (Steve Bastoni). Initially aloof, Ayshe soon becomes a source of support, advising him to seek out a fisherman to take him to Gallipoli beachhead after the British War Office refuses to grant him a permit to enter the territory. His presence there surprises ANZAC captain Lt.-Col. Hughes (Jai Courtney), who is in the midst of the recovery effort to "put a name next to every body," and adds another source of potential tension as Hughes is already dealing with frictions stemming from having Turkish war veterans Major Hassan (Yilmaz Erdogan) and Sergeant Jemal (Cem Yilmaz) assist in the mission.
The Water Diviner makes no bones about its anti-war stance, but it is also quite clear in the esteem and gratitude it holds for those fallen soldiers. More remarkable is the sensitivity and sense of comradeship it extends to the Turks, who suffered greater fatalities. Indeed, Crowe and his screenwriters are wholly invested in understanding more than a little about the so-called enemy, whether it be Hassan's involvement with the nationalists or Ayshe disclosing how everything, including romance, is decided by the reading of coffee grounds.
Crowe fashions a big-hearted, old-fashioned, sweeping epic that isn't ashamed to wear its heart on its sleeve. It has some minor drawbacks - the cuts to the battle scenes often disrupt the rhythm of the movie, and Joshua using his water-divining powers to locate his sons tips the mysticism into corny territory - but these are mostly overshadowed by Crowe's energy as a director, his understated turn as an actor, and the cast's first-rate performances. Cinematographer Andrew Lesnie does exquisite work capturing the splendours of both Australia and modern-day Turkey, though all pale in comparison to Kurylenko's impossible beauty.
The Water Diviner
Directed by: Russell Crowe
Written by: Andrew Anastasios, Andrew Knight
Starring: Russell Crowe, Olga Kurylenko, Yilmaz Erdogan, Cem Yilmaz, Jai Courtney, Dylan Georgiades, Steve Bastoni, Damon Herriman, Isabel Lucas, Jacqueline McKenzie, Ryan Corr, Dan Wyllie
