Russell Crowe makes his feature directorial debut with The Water Diviner, an admirable, occasionally sentimental exploration of violence and loss.
He also stars in it, as Australian widow Joshua Connor who travels to Constantinople following the Battle of Gallipoli. There he hopes to retrieve the bodies of his three sons lost in the bloodshed.
As the title suggests, Connor is, indeed, a water diviner. There are gorgeous scenes of him at work in epic Antipodean deserts – a breathtaking contrast with the mud and blood-soaked grit of the trenches.
This is a powerfully humanist film. We see battlefields with piles of skulls and encounter wry locals in Turkey, such as landlady Ayshe (Olga Kurylenko, Quantum of Solace). There is also acknowledgment that Gallipoli was not solely a tragedy for the Allies, with an Australian Lieutenant (Jai Courtney, Divergent) acknowledging that, while 3,000 Australian soldiers died over just four days, 7,000 Turkish soldiers were killed. “We didn’t take too many prisoners either.”
There are cloying moments too and some of the performances are a tad heavy-handed. However, this is ultimately a hugely promising debut from Crowe.