The Water Diviner (2014 film)

Category: Australian wartime drama

Directed by: Russell Crowe

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The timing of this movie review is somewhat fortuitous - ANZAC Day is a week away, so now is a good a time as any to publish my review of the 2014 World War I drama, The Water Diviner.

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Some of you may be familiar with the term deus ex machina, a literal translation of the phrase "god from the machine" and this term is used in literature or performance art to describe a contrived and/or unrealistic solution to a problem the plot presents. 

Some examples of this phenomenon you might be familiar with include in Lord Of The Rings, the Great Eagles appearing out of nowhere to take Frodo and Samwise out of Mordor once the ring has been destroyed, despite not being part of the plot at any previous stage. The aliens in War Of The Worlds suddenly die because of…bacteria. In Sicario 2, Bernicio Del Toro's character somehow survives a point-blank gun shot to the head. And the convoluted plan to stab The Creeper with a weather vane somehow works out in Jeepers Creepers: Reborn - these are all deus ex machina. Now, while a bit of DeM isn't a death-knell for a movie, you have to keep in mind that if you're going to employ an improbable resolution to a plot point, just don't take the piss.

And why "God Of The Machine", you may ask? Because performers who played the gods in the dramas of old would be lowered down into a scene by winches or ropes (machines) to do their god thing.

So why am starting off a movie review with a description of an obscure Latin phrase? Because there is one specific scene in the 2014 war-time drama movie The Water Diviner, starring and directed by Russell Crowe, that I felt like not only was the piss being taken, but my bladder was being absolutely violated.

Let me go over the plot and then we'll get in to my thoughts.

The plot (haphazardly summarised):

Set in 1919 in the aftermath of WW1, Joshua Connor (Crowe) and his wife (Jacqueline McKenzie) live in the outback of Australia and eke out an existence. Joshua's trade craft is that he is a water diviner, someone who uses sticks and poles to find water trapped underground. Joshua and his wife struggle with the fact that their three sons have not returned home after serving in the Australia & New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) during The Great War, his wife taking the grief quite hard.

Now alone, Connor makes a promise to his deceased wife that he will bring his sons home to bury alongside her, so to that end he makes his way to Turkiye (you know, Gallipoli and all that). When he arrives, he is robbed by a little kid whose ulterior motive is to get the Australian tourist to stay at his mum's hotel, his mum just happening to be the very-easy-on-the-eye Ayshe (played by the definitely not Turkish Olga Kurlyenko).

After bribing a fisherman to get him over to Gallipoli Cove, he comes across the Australian and Turkish military officials working together to bury their dead. Connor somehow finds out that two of his sons, Henry and Edward, were shot on the battlefield, but they cannot find any remains of his last son, Art. The Turks there indicate he MAY have been taken as a prisoner of war.

Connor returns back to the hotel where Ayshe is about to be married off to a relative, and these relatives are unhappy about an Australian being at the hotel - however, the hotel kinda needs people, especially foreigners, to keep the money coming in (not unlike Australia's higher education system). Not helping things is the fact that the Greeks are invading Turkiye in the midst of the defeated Ottoman Empire and none of the British or ANZAC forces can be arsed helping out.

[Hold your bladders, folks - here it comes…]

Forlorn and out of answers, Connor lies on his bed in his hotel room and has a vision - out of absolutely fucking nowhere - of Art as a Whirling Dervish, and immediately concludes that Art is in a specific monastery in a specific Turkish countryside. Fucking why? And how?

Connor jumps on a train with a group of Turkish soldiers to the region where he believes/knows Art is, but this also just happens to be where the Greek military is attacking. The train gets ambushed by the Greeks. Connor is almost killed but flees to a village where he spots a water-divining well that looks suspiciously like one he would have made. Surprise of surprises, Connor realises it was built by his son and finally finds the monastery that Art is in - just like in the vision he had. Art confesses that he killed his one of his brothers to put him out of his misery. The village then gets attacked by Greeks (those Greeks sure are persistent) but Art knows a way through the mountains to escape.

Art wants to stay in the Turkish countryside, so Connor returns to the hotel where Ayshe shows a bit of interest in him.

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On the day that I saw this movie, my wife and I had the use of two free movie tickets. Me, I really wanted to support Australian cinema so I chose this, while my wife chose some big-name Pixar animated feature. I got out after the theatre and said to my wife "I was the youngest person in that cinema by at least thirty years!" - the cinema for this movie was full of old people probably trying to relive war-time memories or something.

As a movie, yeah, it's OK. Decent production values and good acting by everyone involved saves this from being Lousy and keeps it at Decent in terms of rankings. It probably tries a bit TOO hard to pull at the heart strings, but the overall feeling was that this was a Russell Crowe vanity project. The man is a great actor - I won't deny that for a second - but sometimes, those who are brilliant at their craft need to be reined in so that their ego doesn't ruin their work.

STAR RATING: 3/5