Russell Crowe's love letter to the Turks

Rating: 4/10 (14 August 2016)

THE WATER DIVINER is a family drama set in the years following Australia's disastrous foray into WW1, the Gallipoli campaign. Russell Crowe plays a grieving father whose three sons all vanished, presumed dead, in the battle. Spurred by an old battle diary he decides to travel to Turkey to find out the fate of his offspring for himself.
This is a film that seems to have been devised as an ill-conceived history lesson for Australian viewers. Certainly as a movie it's not very interesting, lacking life and vision. There are a handful of flashback battle sequences in the film which play out all the clichés, and the present day material involving Crowe's character isn't very good. His romance with Olga Kurylenko (utterly out of her depth in her attempt to play a Turk), clumsily shoehorned into the story, is quite laughable.
Elsewhere this veers between maudlin introspection and old-fashioned jingoism. What's most surprising is the blatant way this film whitewashes history, with each country being stereotyped to basic levels. The British are humourless, dour, and unfriendly; the Greeks are evil; the Aussies are gentle and heroic; the Turks are misunderstood. It's basic stuff indeed and portrays certain events in surprising ways given the complexity of the real-life historical situation. The climax is as predictable as they come, and although Crowe employs decent cinematography in his directorial debut, he just doesn't have the power to bring a lacklustre script to life.