The storyline of The Water Diviner was fleshed out from a fleeting mention, somewhere in a World War I archive, of an Australian farmer who travelled to the faraway battlefields of Gallipoli in modern-day Turkey in search of the three sons he had lost to war. The archives made no further mention of the farmer or of what became of his effort to trace his sons, but actor Russell Crowe’s directorial debut The Water Diviner demonstrates that there is enough pathos and poignancy in that trivial anecdote to carry an entire film, whose plotline is situated squarely at the intersection of war drama and searing personal loss.
The Battle of Gallipoli, which unfolded in 1915-16, was a defining milestone in the war and in the destinies of many countries that were caught up in the action. Allied forces, arrayed against the troops of a crumbling Ottoman Empire (which was on Germany’s side), were preparing to take the Gallipoli peninsula, but were beaten back after an eight-month battle that claimed over 120,000 lives, including over 70,000 Turks. Some 10,000 soldiers from Australia and New Zealand (which were then dominions of the British Empire) died fighting on the Allied side, and the Gallipoli campaign remains a forever weeping wound in the Oz-NZ psyche to this day.
That haunting history forms the backdrop for Crowe’s directorial exploration, and to give fair credit, he manages to draw even those of us from other parts of the world into this provincial tale. That’s partly because the tragedy that Crowe channels as the protagonist Joshua Connor — of a father fated to outlive his children, and whose wife is driven out of her mind by the loss — is fairly universal. The war scenes, revisited in flashback sequences, are also gripping.
Crowe’s delineation of military history is deeply empathetic to the Turkish side. He acknowledges the dignity with which even men of war conduct themselves away from the battlefield. Major Hasan, the Ottoman commander who oversaw the operation at Gallipoli, returns to the theatre of war and helps Connor with his mission. That role, played by an Omar Sharif-esque Yilmaz Erdogan, is pure class. If anything, it is the British army officers, hell-bent on sending a stubborn Connor back to Australia, so that they can get on with the impersonal job of accounting for the war dead and missing, who come across as heartless.
The injection of a romantic interest between Connor and the conveniently war-widowed Turkish innkeeper (played by ex-Bond girl Olga Kurylenko) in Istanbul appears somewhat strained, but a film so otherwise underlain with tragedy perhaps needed something hope-inspiring as well. The vivid cinematography by Andrew Lesnie (famed for The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit series) also infuses life. Overall, a haunting war drama that marks a distinguished directorial debut for Crowe.