‘The Water Diviner’ Review: Lackluster and melodramatic

Oggs Cruz

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‘The Water Diviner’ Review: Lackluster and melodramatic

© PHOTO : MARK ROGERS

Russell Crowe stars in 'The Water Diviner,' also his directorial debut

I think we should be mature enough as a nation to take into account the story that the other blokes have to tell. You know because we did invade a sovereign nation that we’d never had an angry word with. And I think it’s time it should be said.”

It is but apt to grant Russell Crowe’s The Water Diviner a bit of perspective from his quote (see more here), one that has irked many veterans, which somewhat encapsulates the one of the reasons why the film was created in the first place.

The awkward film, which tells the tale of a father of three Aznac soldiers who were presumably killed at the Gallipoli campaign, is truly a ball of confusion. It opens with an elaborate battle scene where Turkish fighters charge towards the Allied forces, only to find out that their foes have abandoned their posts and have retreated from the battlegrounds.

 

The film then cuts to Australia, where its protagonist Connor (Russell Crowe) successfully conjures water out of the parched outback only to end what essentially was a pleasant day with his wife nagging him for losing their children to the war. The wife drowns herself, forcing Crowe’s perpetually forlorn father to sail towards Turkey to locate the bones of his kids in fulfillment of a promise to his dead wife.

Photo courtesy of Ayala Cinemas

Sinking into obscurity

The tale plods along, fawning over exotic Istanbul while trying to keep its anti-war sentiment afloat amidst the plentiful distractions. 

There’s a beautiful woman (Olga Kurylenko) for Connor to flirt and barter romantic glances with. She has a little boy (Dylan Georgiades).

Photo courtesy of Ayala Cinemas

The arrogant Brit officer, who unceremoniously takes Connor’s mission as both pointless and bothersome, is balanced by an Ottoman major (Yilmaz Erdogan). 

As the film progresses, it sinks further into obscurity, never really maintaining an image or vision to hold on to. It looks and feels like one of those historical epics that excite with powerful vistas of far-flung locales, but it never really achieves any form of integrity as it confuses old time adventurism and romanticism with surface-level gun touting and hormonal exchanges.

Photo courtesy of Ayala Cinemas

Incurably melodramatic

Had Crowe fashioned his flick the way he provokes in his real life pronouncements, perhaps The Water Diviner could be more interesting. Sadly, the film is rendered insignificant by its indecisiveness. It is sappy and dully sober.

Incurably melodramatic, its efforts at saying something political about Australia’s involvement in a distant land is muddled by its allegiance to cinematic artifice. Even Crowe’s portrayal of his unbearably stoic daddy-hero is riddled with reverence that there is almost nothing left for the imagination, not even a tinge of cynicism to counter the rest of the film’s lavish pageantry. 

In the end, the film works nothing like what Crowe might have envisioned the film to be, which is as an exposure of the sins of history to the men and women who have sacrificed too much to be but pawns of the powers that steer the world. It is but a lousy portraiture of fatherly determination, set in an alternate history that has been drawn out of lousy conclusions and half-hearted advocacies. 

Photo courtesy of Ayala Cinemas

A non-event

Crowe could have done more had he simply wrote a treatise expounding his thoughts on the issue. He could have angered more than a group of veterans and perhaps started a bit of reassessment of history and its well-entrenched lies.

The Water Diviner, which seems carefully woven with all the art in the world given that it has been lovingly lensed by the late Andrew Lesnie and scored by David Hirschfelder, is as tepid as it is timid. It produces no other emotions except the artificial ones that Crowe’s writers, Andrew Knight and Andrew Anastacios, machinated with the extravagant and long-winded narrative turns they surrounded the supposedly true story that the film is based from.

Films like The Water Diviner have been done countless times before, and this is precisely its problem. Absent its high profile first time director and his provocative announcements about the history that his film is supposedly tackling, the film feels exactly like a non-event, a film unworthy of any extended attention. – Rappler.com

Francis Joseph Cruz litigates for a living and writes about cinema for fun. The first Filipino movie he saw in the theaters was Carlo J. Caparas’ ‘Tirad Pass.’ Since then, he’s been on a mission to find better memories with Philippine cinema. Profile photo by Fatcat Studios

 

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