The Water Diviner

The Water Diviner (15)

Australia/Turkey/USA 2014  111 mins  Dir: Russell Crowe  Starring: Russell Crowe, Olga Kurylenko, Jai Courtney, Cem Yilmaz, Yilmaz Erdogan

There’s the germ of a great idea in Russell Crowe’s stodgily sprawling, old-fashioned epic period wartime drama of family, sacrifice, dogged persistence, reconciliation, occasional fisticuffs and all-round manliness. On the Gallipoli fields where a particularly bloody and pointless battle was fought, officers from both sides of the conflict form an uneasy alliance to reclaim and identify the thousands of Anzac war dead as they reflect on the modest strategic gains and losses achieved by this obscene loss of life. Alas, to get to this, you have to wade through some pretty turgid dialogue, a cheesy cross-cultural romance, a lot of daft mystical guff and some Indiana Jones-style action sequences that seem to have been inserted at the behest of the studio to prevent the audience dozing off.

In 1919, rufty-tufty farmer and dowser Joshua Connor (Crowe) locates water with his magic sticks in the parched Australian outback. But his joy at digging a well is short lived, as Mrs. Connor promptly goes bonkers and tops herself, having become consumed by grief at the loss of the couple’s three strapping sons on the same day at Gallapoli. With nothing left to live for, stoic Joshua sets off to fulfil the promise he made to his late wife to bring the boys home for burial. On arrival in Constantinople, he’s rebuffed by the starchy, stiff-upper-lipped Brits. Rather more happily, he finds a room in a hotel run by a former Bond girl (Olga Kurylenko, for it is she, in an especially thankless role) who’s trying rather unsuccessfully to hide her hottiness beneath some unflattering outfits. As a Turkish war widow and single mother of the mandatory adorable urchin, she naturally takes an instant dislike to our hero. She’s also a dab hand at reading the future in coffee grains. But we need no such talent, since it’s pretty bloody obvious where all this is going. The film becomes more interesting when Connor’s determination to use his flashback-driven mystical powers to find his sons’ bodies impresses Turkish Major Hasan (Erdogan), and an unlikely friendship develops between the two men.

Crowe the first-time director gets an impressively restrained performance out of Crowe the actor, possibly because he’s in the unique position of not being cowed by the man’s fearsome reputation. Andrew Knight and Andrew Anasasios’s manipulative if culturally sensitive script is also suitably respectful of Turkish sensibilities, while Lord of the Rings/Hobbit veteran Andrew Lesnie’s superb cinematography is often breathtaking. But all too often this feels like several different films of varying quality welded together a tad ham-fistedly, with that late detour into action-adventure being especially jarring, the clunky romance bringing back unwanted memories of the godawful A Good Year, and the mercifully undercooked supernatural cobblers functioning only as a cheap plot device.