The Water Diviner

Russell Crowe as George Galloway in The Water Diviner.

I haven’t done a review for a while – largely down to the fact that I’m a lazy fucker, haven’t really seen anything that made me want to write about it and March was a bitch of a month at work.  If you feel cheated, please get in touch and I’ll refund your subscription fee.

Anyway, when an actor begins to direct it’s always worth seeing, hence my going to see The Water Diviner, directed by Russell Crowe.  Crowe is fantastically entertaining.  Sadly he’s far more entertaining in interviews than in his films. Seriously, you’ll have more fun reading this interview than you would watching any film he’s done recently.  When an actor gets in the directing chair you always look at the directors they have worked with previously and try to gauge what their film will be like. Crowe has worked with Ridley Scott several times, though not in any of Scott’s best work (I think Gladiator is overrated), and has also appeared in films directed by Darren Aronofsky and Peter Weir, his fellow Australian who directed the film Gallipoli, which is also what The Water Diviner is about, sort of.

It’s sort of about the Gallipoli campaign, it’s sort of a love story, it’s sort of about Turkish nationalism, it’s sort of about a relationship between a father and his sons, it’s sort of about loss, it’s sort of about Australian nationalism.  It’s sort of alright.  There is a phenomenon of “first film syndrome”, where a first time director throws everything at the film because they might not get the chance again, and The Water Diviner certainly suffers from a slight incoherence about its themes. It also suffers from having Crowe in pretty much every scene. If he spent more time behind the camera than in front of it, we may have had a better film, but then it probably wouldn’t have got made if he hadn’t agreed to be in it.

The Water Diviner is also what I”d call a Cargo Cult Film.  If you don’t know, during the Second World War, the Americans and Japanese turned up on Pacific Islands with vast amounts of materiel, building landing strips and bringing 20th Century equipment to people living a hunter gatherer existence.  When the islands were no longer strategically important, they left, taking their shiny things with them.  The islanders cleared their own landing strips, and built ersatz control towers, headphones made of coconuts etc, believing that this would bring the ‘planes and their riches back,  Obviously it didn’t work. They had all the right elements, but it didn’t fit together how it should have done, and the end results weren’t what they wanted.  The Water Diviner is like that; it has a basis in fact (the Gallipoli campaign), love and loss and romance and the birth of two nations (Australia and Turkey), but those elements don’t necessarily make the film an epic.

Some bits; a piece of magic realism that leads to a plot twist may have worked in the source novel, but on screen it doesn’t. The English characters are straight out of the upper class donkey school of officer (to be fair, that’s probably accurate for Gallipoli) and though the Turkish losses there (far, far more than the British or ANZAC deaths) are mentioned, it is only briefly, though I did like the pile of bodies marked “Turkish bones” by the side of the road while the Australians dutifully locate and rebury the allied dead.

The story of Gallipoli is as important to Australians and New Zealanders as Dunkirk and Arnhem is to the British, and in the hundredth anniversary it deserves a better commemoration than this. If Crowe directs again, he needs more focus, and less time on screen.