The Water Diviner—Movie Review

by Peter J. O'Connell

The Water Diviner. Released (U.S.): April 2015. Runtime: 111 mins. Rated: R for war violence, including some disturbing images.

In April 1915 British, Australian and New Zealand troops landed on Turkey's Gallipoli peninsula and began an eight-months' attempt to reach Constantinople (Istanbul) and knock the Ottoman Empire, Germany's ally, out of the World War. The struggle was gallant but doomed and very bloody. For Australia and New Zealand, however, the campaign was seen as a baptism of fire, a coming of age for the two Commonwealth countries, and it occupies a hallowed place in the hearts of Aussies and Kiwis to this day, a hundred years later.

The Water Diviner, directed by and starring Australian actor Russell Crowe, is a movie dealing with the aftermath of the Gallipoli campaign. Crowe plays Joshua Cooper, a newly widowed farmer from a semiarid region of Australia, who has the gift of finding water with the use of divining rods. Joshua's three sons were declared “missing in action” at Gallipoli, and Joshua comes to Turkey in 1919 determined to learn what happened to them and recover their remains, if possible.

The situation in Turkey is tense in 1919. Diplomats are carving up the Ottoman Empire at peace conferences that will shape (misshape?) the modern Middle East; Britain occupies part of Turkey; grievances between Turkey and Greece are leading toward war; nationalist and secularist Turks are plotting to overthrow the sultanate/caliphate.

British authorities at first deny Joshua the right to go to the Gallipoli battlefields and grave sites. He has to remain in a small hotel in Istanbul, where he befriends a little Turkish boy (Dylan Georgiades) and observes the problems of the boy's lovely mother, Ayshe (Olga Kurylenko), who is attempting to avoid becoming the second (polygamous) wife of her husband's brother. The brother claims that Ayshe's husband died at Gallipoli; she claims that, like Joshua's sons, he is “missing in action” and could still be alive.

Eventually, Joshua is allowed to go to the Gallipoli sites, where a sympathetic Turkish major (Yilmaz Erdogan) involved in the nationalist movement helps him ascertain for sure the fate of two of his sons. The rest of the movie intercuts Joshua's attempts to learn what happened to his third son with events at the hotel and developments on the broader political/military scene. Metaphorically speaking, the question hanging over the movie is whether Joshua, the water diviner, will find what he needs for his life to begin growing again.

The movie, Crowe's directorial debut, has both distinctive strengths and weaknesses. Crowe has always been good at playing strong men with deep feelings palpably held in check. It is also hard to take one's eyes off Olga Kurylenko's performance when she is on the screen, no matter how many other characters are sharing the screen with her. And Yilmaz Erdogan is topnotch as the Turkish major.

The movie's scenes are often gorgeously photographed but, however, tend to proceed in a kind of slideshow fashion—scene with beginning/middle/end followed by scene with beginning/middle/end, and so on and so forth. This kind of editing actually tends to weaken the unity of the film as a whole.

The movie deserves credit for treating an important historical topic, Middle Eastern aspects of the First World War, that is not often addressed and in dealing with somewhat complex personal and political issues in a rather intelligent way (despite some generic derring-do near the end). However, though its Australian and Turkish characters are treated humanistically, its British characters are rather stereotyped and the Greek characters demonized.

“Footnotes” to the film: (1) Other movies dealing with the First World War in the Middle East include: British director David Lean's epic Lawrence of Arabia (1962), which made Peter O'Toole a superstar; Australian director Peter Weir's Gallipoli (1981), an extremely moving antiwar film that made Mel Gibson a star; Australian director Simon Wincer's The Lighthorsemen (1987), about Australian cavalry in Syria and Palestine. (2) American director Robert Wise's The Desert Rats (1953), with James Mason Richard Burton and Robert Newton, deals with the exploits of Australian troops in North Africa during the Second World War.