Review: The Water Diviner

Dir: Russell Crowe

With: Russell Crowe, Olga Kurylenko, Yilmaz Erdogan

Runtime: 111 minutes

RUSSELL Crowe, one time Gladiator of this cinema parish, has long made a virtue and a good living out of acting roles that are heavy on the swagger. It was perhaps inevitable, then, that in his debut film as a director his ambition should be so towering that one almost needs a telescope to see the top.

That he does not wholly succeed in reaching the heights he sets himself in this drama set in the aftermath of the First World War should not take away too much from what is a polished first outing. Crowe makes his fair share of mistakes, at times showing himself to be more of a Sunday night TV drama type than a Spielberg, but he also demonstrates that he can craft scenes of such power that they act like a branding iron on the memory.

The Water Diviner, which introduces itself as being "inspired by true events", opens with the evacuation of Anzac troops from Gallipoli after the Ottoman victory. From there we cut to four years later and a farm in Australia, where Connor (Crowe) is embarked upon a hard day's divining and digging for precious water, a task that calls for a mix of brute strength and what seems like mystical powers. Waiting at home is his wife and an empty room where their three sons, posted missing at Gallipoli, should be sleeping.

Consumed by a need to know what happened to his boys, Connor heads to Gallipoli, where Australian forces are engaged in a new battle to turn the killing fields into a war graves site. Pompous British officers tell him to go home, friendlier Aussie soldiers advise that the task is all but impossible. Among the few willing to help is a Turkish commander (Yilmaz Erdogan) who fought in the battle and is there to help with mapping out the graves.

Just as Crowe's character operates largely on faith, so Crowe the director asks the same of the audience as the picture unfolds. At times, the story took a stretch too far for this viewer. This is a tale that sets out to stir the emotions, and is none too subtle in the way it goes about matters. While one cannot blame a director bloke for that, Crowe the storyteller is too fond of neat twists. In the latter stages especially, the tone becomes one of a Boy's Own adventure with a hefty dose of Mills and Boon.

Where does romance come into a war drama? One might well ask. Here, it is in the form of a beautiful Turkish hotelier, played by Olga Kurylenko, who also has a loved one posted missing at Gallipoli. While staying at her establishment, and bonding with her son, Connor begins to realise the extent of the suffering on both sides. Once again, it is a reasonable enough broadening out of the story, but Crowe does not know when to stop, so that what was an engrossing war film begins to seem like Witness transferred to Turkey.

As he moves between the goings on back at the hotel and the trauma of what happened on the battlefield, the shifts in tone are so sharp as to induce whiplash. Had Crowe dropped the hotel half of the story his film would have been none the poorer for it. Where he excels himself is not in the hearts and flower stuff of romance, but in the heartfelt story of young men, from all sides, being slaughtered on the battlefield. In showing us this, Crowe constructs scenes which are truly harrowing, the sights and sounds difficult to bear. There is raw power and brutal honesty on show here, not to mention real talent.

Crowe does what any filmmaker making a war drama should in showing the enormity of the sacrifices and the brutality of battle. While he ultimately takes too broad a brush to the canvas he shows that he can master detail too. He just has to choose the right detail to highlight next time. For next time, on the evidence of this effort, there ought to be.