Kitch’s Top 5 World War One Movies: #4 – The Water Diviner

Director: Russell Crowe
Release Date: December 26, 2014
Starring: Russell Crowe, Olga Kurylenko, Jai Courtney & Jacqueline McKenzie

In A Few Words: A father, having lost his three sons during the Gallipoli campaign, and then his wife in the years thereafter, journeys to Turkey to find where his sons are buried and bring them home to lay alongside their mother.

Spoilers Ahead

Oscar winner Russell Crowe’s directorial debut is a sterling one, and his time behind the camera doesn’t take away from his work in front of it. He’s brilliant as Joshua Conner, a farmer from north-western Victoria, a man who can pretty much conjure up water from even the driest ground, and who suffers the loss of his three sons, Edward, Henry and Arthur, during the brutal Gallipoli campaign, and then his wife soon after when she commits suicide, unable to deal with the grief of losing her three sons.

With not much else to live for, Conner travels to Turkey, meets a Turkish widow (Kurylenko) and her son in Istanbul, before managing to find his way to the Gallipoli battlefield. There the Imperial War Graves unit are working with members of the Turkish army to identify the thousands of Australian dead, and in a sobering moment, we are reminded that the Turks lost more than 70,000 men defending their homeland.

Interspersed with battle scenes and flashbacks to Conner’s three children when they were much younger, including a particularly well-done scene in a giant dust storm in the Australian countryside, Conner and the military detachment comb the battlefield and find the final resting places of Edward and Henry – one was found to have been shot through the head, execution-style, by the Turkish commanders, which sends Conner into a rage – but Arthur is nowhere to be found.

It’s later revealed that Arthur had been taken prisoner, the information coming from a Turkish major (played excellently by (Yılmaz Erdoğan) who is a part of his country’s fight against invading Greek troops, and Conner is mixed up in a skirmish between Turks and Greeks as he travels to the site of where his son was moved after the Gallipoli campaign.

Not based on any particular real event, though certainly highlighting the harsh realities of the post-war days in both Australia and Turkey – and the effect the fighting had on everyone from soldiers to family members at home – the film has a few plot holes, and a somewhat predictable ending, but you tend to focus less on that because the story is gripping, and the action scenes are so well put together.

The film succeeds because it shows a different side to the Gallipoli campaign than television shows and earlier films have done. We seem to think little about the aftermath of the nine-month campaign, or, at least, our focus switches to the Western Front. The difference to other productions on the same subject, as well as a moving story and great production values, sets The Water Diviner apart.

It’s hard not to be moved by Crowe’s performance. There’s genuine feeling in every scene, and you get the sense that this movie, more than any other, has been a particular labour of love for him. The way he humanises the Turkish army – they were fighting to stop us invading them, after all – earned the movie rave reviews in Turkey and Australia.