The Water Diviner

A soldier returns to Europe after WWI to find his family.

IMDb
Trailer

looks decent enough

It’s acceptable.

VI

If you can just look past a few of those unrealistic scenes, you're left with a perfectly solid movie featuring some truly standout moments.

I actually really liked it. It’s visually stunning—New York City looks great on screen 😍 Crowe was fantastic; he brought this emotional grit and persistence to the role. Even though there was a real risk of it turning into a total tear-jerker, somehow, all things considered, it didn't miss the mark. It ended up being a genuinely beautiful movie with a happy ending that felt earned. Olga is gorgeous 😍

The war scenes are top-tier, really gripping, but that whole romantic subplot? Total cliché. Feels like drinking lukewarm lemonade.

It’s certainly worth a look...

The Water Diviner (2014)
Australia, Turkey

I just finished watching this, and I have to say, one thought keeps looping in my mind: the ratio of effort put in versus the actual result is totally off. It’s definitely a case where the outcome doesn't live up to the ambition. You know, they say life writes better stories than Hollywood ever could, and a plot about a father searching for his lost sons should be absolutely bursting with raw emotion. Honestly, you should probably factor a whole box of tissues into the price of your movie ticket! Sadly, all that intended emotion just seems to evaporate because the script gets completely lost in its own dialogue. Instead of a deep dive, we get two hours of a guy hunting for his kids and jumping through hoops like he's stuck in some clunky American daytime soap opera—those fight scenes with the Greeks were particularly awkward. Aside from a shaky script, we have to mention that this is Russell Crowe's directorial debut. Now, his acting is still solid, but his directing? Not so much. He actually nails the pacing, though; he keeps things moving right until the end. Other than some lovely cinematography, nothing else really leaps off the screen in this production. As for the acting, it's a mixed bag. I expected more from Crowe since he's an Oscar winner, but he left me wanting more. He's actually a bigger disappointment behind the camera than in front of it, especially when you hold him to the high standard set by Gladiator. The main female lead, Olga Kurylenko, didn't really leave a lasting impression on me, even though she was clearly placed there to add that layer of a lonely woman navigating a restrictive, traditional culture. Unlike Aisha, who didn't quite make the most of her screen time, the actor playing Lieutenant Hasan (Recep Tayyip Erdoğan) was far more compelling.

The question of a father's devotion to his missing sons and his emotional breakdown after losing a wife who never recovered from the tragedy is just one side of the coin. The other side deals with the possibility of forgiveness between enemies who, years after the bloody carnage at Gallipoli, find themselves facing their own unhealed wounds. In that sense, the script succeeds somewhat, as it slowly builds a process of forgiveness within the characters—which, let's face it, is really the only way to survive in this world. Overall, though, the film leaves such heavy themes looking rather pale. It feels like they tried to do so much but ultimately achieved so little. What a shame! Our very own Gladiator turned into a cold, distant radiator.🙏

briefly ; It could have been so much better! Watch it and see for yourself.🍿

Hmm. It feels as though the entire film is merely a skeletal framework—something carefully conceived, yet everything within it seems to be falling apart. There were stretches where I found it quite unconvincing. The moments intended to hit hard, the motivations, the very fates of the characters... it all left me with such a lukewarm impression, as if the director lacked either the patience, the will, or perhaps the sheer subtlety required to truly sink into the subject matter he was attempting to tackle.

For instance, we have the incredibly thin, lackluster portrayal of why the sons even bothered going to war in the first place; essentially, their motivation isn't even depicted, nor does the film bother to engage with it. Furthermore, the film completely ignores the father's stance on the whole ordeal. He explains his position, I think, in one solitary sentence about fighting for principles, which strikes me as pathetically insufficient—especially for a film of this caliber and given its central message. One could argue that the director is making a conscious choice to avoid "unimportant" minutiae, merely dropping hints and expecting the audience to construct the rest of the emotional weight themselves, but lately, I’ve begun rolling my eyes at this tendency to leave the most vital narrative segments as mere afterthoughts. To me, it starts looking less like artistic restraint and more like directorial laziness. I kept finding myself recalling scenes from the legend of autumn and Patriot, where young men eagerly rush off to war and clash with wiser, more seasoned men because of it; here, none of that is sufficiently fleshed out—in fact, the director doesn't even touch upon it—and that lack of backstory left me with an underwhelming, unfinished feeling.

Then there are the unconvincing reactions and behaviors of the characters (SPOILERS), from Crowe, who snaps at Hasan only to instantly calm down, undergo a sudden epiphany, and apologize to him—it happens so swiftly and crudely that it feels almost mechanical; to the equally mechanical Scarlett Johansson, who shifts from lamenting her fate under the boot of patriarchy to suddenly tossing aside all doubts and fears just because destiny is supposedly written in coffee grounds, acting as if everything else will simply fall into place. 🤔 Not to mention that the actress herself sticks out like a sore thumb; she doesn't fit the role of the woman from Turkey at all.
And I should mention the total absence of drama in the scene where one brother kills the other. Perhaps I just couldn't get invested, but it was never clear to me how he could be so certain in his position that the man was incurably wounded and thus deserved to be shot immediately afterward. Once again, I am reminded of the incomparably more powerful scene with the dying brother in the legend of autumn.

All in all, this is a clumsy, occasionally lost, and dramatically (to say nothing of other ways) unconvincing film, despite its noble intentions. The "reconciliation" between two people—one of whom is almost directly responsible for the death of the other's children (though one could debate those "responsibilities," as the film hints)—only to find their remains years later, carries a message of humanity that moved me, notwithstanding this stumbling directorial debut.