The Water Diviner

Rus­sell Crowe has always been unpre­dictable, both onscreen and off. It should come as no sur­prise, then, that his direc­to­r­i­al debut is a tonal­ly see­saw­ing movie mish­mash. The Water Divin­er is an earnest fam­i­ly dra­ma, a bruis­ing bat­tle film, a hap­less­ly exe­cut­ed romance, with cul­ture clash­es and inter­na­tion­al pol­i­tics thrown in for bonus befuddlement.

It’s a film that radi­ates with its director’s good inten­tions, from the sun-streaked out­back open­ing — where an unas­sist­ed Crowe digs a well in a brazen feat of super-strength — to its attempt at a gen­tly humor­ous, heart-warm­ing finale. But Crowe and cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Andrew Lesnie lay the glow on so thick it’s as if much of what we see is encased in amber.

Set four years after World War One’s bloody Bat­tle of Gal­lipoli, it fol­lows Crowe’s indomitable Aus­tralian farmer Con­nor as he trav­els to Turkey where his three ANZAC sol­dier sons are miss­ing in action, pre­sumed dead. Step­ping off the boat in Istan­bul laden large­ly with his own impos­ing, unre­fined mas­culin­i­ty, Con­nor is imme­di­ate­ly at sea in a city of bold colours and float­ing fabrics.

He’s sin­gled out by a boy, Orhan (Dylan Geor­giades), who leads him to the hotel of his beau­ti­ful moth­er Ayshe (Olga Kurylenko), a woman who has enjoyed a lib­er­at­ed lifestyle under Euro­pean rule and who catch­es Connor’s eye. She’s in denial about the death of her hus­band and is involved in a cat and mouse courtship with her husband’s con­ser­v­a­tive broth­er Omer (Steve Bas­toni), who is deter­mined to take her as his sec­ond wife.

Lat­er, when Con­nor trav­els to Gal­lipoli, he adapts his tal­ent for water divin­ing to the task of locat­ing his boys’ bod­ies, to the bemuse­ment of the assem­bled forces, befriend­ing both an Aus­tralian in charge of iden­ti­fi­ca­tion (Jai Court­ney) and a Turk­ish major (Yil­maz Erdo­gan), with the lat­ter show­ing him great kind­ness and assis­tance in his quest.

Crowe’s abil­i­ty to con­cise­ly com­mu­ni­cate the hor­rors of war impress­es, but his first nar­ra­tive fea­ture as direc­tor is also huge­ly dis­joint­ed. Although it boasts fero­cious flash­backs and thank­ful­ly doesn’t endorse inva­sion or colo­nial­ism, the film offers a super­fi­cial treat­ment of the sub­ject mat­ter that fails to artic­u­late any real insight, be it psy­cho­log­i­cal or his­tor­i­cal. It’s also occa­sion­al­ly prone to hor­ren­dous car­i­ca­tures (the British stereo­types are espe­cial­ly awful) and oth­er moments of aston­ish­ing misjudgement.

Most prob­lem­at­i­cal­ly, the film’s fair­ly noble ambi­tions are fre­quent­ly thwart­ed by a ten­den­cy toward extreme sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty. The Water Divin­er is almost com­plete­ly undone by its laugh­able roman­tic scenes, which are as pre­pos­ter­ous as per­fume ads. A trip to an ancient cis­tern that begins fros­ti­ly evolves into a play­ful water fight, relayed in bark­ing mad slow-mo, while a whis­pered part­ing is the less-than-sexy, ​‘Be care­ful on the tiles.’ Note to Crowe for next time: keep the war, ditch the romance.