The Diviner Review: A Long Way From Home

The Water Diviner is “inspired by true events” and based literally on a line about a father.

The Water Diviner movie review

Director: Russell Crowe

Cast: Russell Crowe, Olga Kurylenko, Jai Courtney, Yilmaz Erdogan

It must be lonely being an Australian. For the record, the country lost more than 60,000 men in the First World War and at least 20,000 in the Second. Few outside realise that perhaps, though Australia sees its involvement as a glue that joined its disparate regions together.

One more thing for the record. Water divining is a contested method of spotting water by walking over an area with an apparatus such as a forked stick, bent rods or pendulum. In the film though, actor-director Crowe uses it less to get water and more to get to the divine.

And, how he tries. To connect Australia to Turkey. Church to mosque. Cowboy hats to colourful burqas. Turkish baths to cricket bats. Barren outback to bustling bazaars. Staid boiled egg to strong Turkish coffee. Invasions a century ago to invasions now (Says a principal character, “Don’t invade a country if you don’t know where it is”). And, most of all, a grieving, gruff father to a grieving, lovely mother.

The result is an obvious effort to cover all bases and offend none between Down Under and Middle East.

It’s four years after WWI’s Gallipoli battle. Joshua (Crowe) is a water diviner currently grieving over his three sons lost during the campaign. As a very fortuitous piece of scripting would have it, Joshua and his sons’ favourite book is The Arabian Nights. When he is not dreaming of scenes from the war at night, Joshua sees images of dervish dancing, though he doesn’t recognise it as such.

After his wife, who blames Joshua for letting their sons sign up for the war, kills herself, he sets out to find what happened to their sons, and get their remains to be buried alongside their mother.

Three months later — a passage that The Water Diviner breezes over — Joshua is in a frenetic Istanbul, which is seething with anger over the English occupation and trying to lay its own ghosts to rest. Again, as luck would have it, Joshua lands right on his feet, led from the dockyard by an impish boy to a hotel run by his luminous mother Ayshe (a very stiff Kurylenko).

When he finally makes his way to the Gallipoli peninsula — a restricted area because of the bloodshed there and the skeletons still lying about — Joshua quickly earns the respect of a much-feared Turkish war hero, Major Hasan (Erdogan). Hasan is there to take account of the Turkish dead, and decides to help Joshua as “he is the only father who came looking”. There may be another reason, but the film doesn’t care to explore.

The Water Diviner is “inspired by true events” and based literally on a line about a father such as Joshua from an account of the Gallipoli campaign. Not that Joshua, played by the ever-capable Crowe, requires much helping.

The first-time director though is a different story. So The Water Diviner is not just about a war (with one particularly powerful scene), or about a romance, or about fathers and sons. It’s also about civilisations rather ham-handedly finding common ground. “For Australia, the war was never about the land. It was about the principle,” Joshua starts to explain, to a confused Hasan (not to say us), before bullets cut the talk short.

And when the twain meet, Erdogan holds his own remarkably. So a rare film about Australia’s WWI campaign whose real star may actually be a Turk? Hmmm…

shalini.langer@expressindia.com

Source:: Indian Express