Movie review: The Water Diviner

Russell Crowe in The Water Diviner. Photo / Supplied

Big stars often make odd choices for their debuts as directors. That quintessentially American actor, Dustin Hoffman, made the very English (and very creaky) Quartet; Ralph Fiennes chose Coriolanus, one of Shakespeare's least likeable plays.

Russell Crowe's idea must have seemed like pure magic: the most Australian of stories, dripping with modern geopolitical relevance, is retold through the eyes of a (slightly) larrikin spirit, just in time for a fabled centenary. So it's hard to understand why the film he has delivered is so conventional, derivative and flat.

Relying on the writing talents of television vet Andrew Knight (the creditable but hardly groundbreaking Rake) and debutant Andrew Anastasios, Crowe has turned in a by-the-numbers crowd-pleaser with remarkably cheesy battlefield sequences and a story arc that manages to be simultaneously predictable and implausible.

Meanwhile, Crowe's professed intention to educate us all about "the Turkish perspective" seems particularly galling in the light of the film's patronising romantic subplot, which involves a statuesque "Turkish" beauty (Ukrainian Bond girl Kurylenko) barely half his age. The warlike Anzacs may have retreated, but our Russ can still bowl 'em over.

An opening title tells us that the film was inspired by real events, though that turns out to be a single line in a letter about "one old chap [who] managed to get here from Australia, looking for his son's grave". The story, though, is pure fiction and even purer hokum.

Crowe plays Joshua Connor, a farmer in dusty Victoria with a gift for the pseudoscientific poppycock referred to in the title. Haunted by the loss of his three sons at Gallipoli (a triple tragedy that has quite unhinged his wife), he sails to Turkey to find and repatriate their remains.

The story of his adventures ransacks a whole library of stereotypes and cliches: the impish youngster scampering through streets where everyone wears a brand-new fez; the lustrous landlady (Kurylenko), a widow in the grasp of a lustful brother-in-law; priggish, toffee-nosed British officers (unlike the fair-go pragmatic Ockers and the noble-savage Turks). Sequences involving a blokes' bonding session over raki, a Turkish bath and Sufi whirling dervishes might have been sponsored by Lonely Planet.

More laughable still is that Joshua's finely honed instinct for water divining allows him to pinpoint, after standing around and clenching his jaw for a while, the exact whereabouts of his sons' remains.

Cinematographer Andrew Lesnie, who shot the Rings and Hobbit trilogies, keeps the visual interest high, particularly in the grand wide landscapes of both countries, and Crowe shows flashes of his skill at holding a highly charged scene (his confrontation with the local priest is a cracker).

But the film as a whole is rarely better than disappointing. Plainly, Connor is intended as our guide on a journey of understanding and it's useful to be reminded that 10 times as many Turks as Australians died (though the Allied and Turkish casualties were about the same). Yet these are details in an otherwise plodding and rather dull film.

The Water Diviner Cast:

Russell Crowe, Olga Kurylenko, Yilmaz Erdogan

Director:

Russell Crowe

Running time:

111 mins Rating: M (violence) In English and Turkish with English subtitles

Verdict:

Plodding and remarkably dull.

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