While parts of The Winter Diviner are occasionally fairly thought-provoking, the film does fail to be a cohesive whole
Russell Crowe has always been magnetic on screen despite his short temper, occasional hubris, and the recent lack of quality roles. The man is undeniably a bit of a phenom, with Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000) as a benchmark for any actor to hold to in terms of stellar performances. Russell Crowe’s brave, noble, humorous, brilliant and stoic General Maximus, is a mesmerising, beloved character that continues to stand the test of time.
With The Water Diviner, an Australian production, with Crowe as a first time director, we have a hodgepodge of a film that is only really saved by the performance of Crowe himself. Even as he comes to life onscreen, the man behind the camera is clearly a bit confused, making a seemingly straightforward story slightly too convoluted by his poetic indulgences.
It is hard to understand why the writers of this movie, Andrew Anastasios and Andrew Knight, might have chosen such a banal story and then tried to imbue it with a hint of magical realism (perhaps as a last ditch attempt to save it from descending into utter triteness). The narrative is very facile: Russell Crowe plays Joshua Connor an Australian farmer who has lost his three sons in the Battle of Gallipoli during the First World War exactly 100 years ago. Connor’s wife Eliza (Jacqueline McKenzie) never recovers from the loss of all three of her children, and when she passes away (she takes her own life), Connor, stricken with grief, vows to return to Turkey to try to trace the remains of his sons so that he may bury them next to their mother.
The film hits its stride as Connor reaches Istanbul and meets Ayshe (played by the truly lovely Olga Kurylenko) – the owner of a charming hotel who refuses to admit to the loss of her husband for the sake of her young, adorable son Orhan (Dylan Georgiades) who develops a marked affection for Connor.
As Connor rushes around trying to find clues to his sons’ remains, he ‘divines’ (hence the forced magical realism) that one of them may still be alive, a development that most savvy moviegoers will have guessed pretty much from the beginning. While parts of the movie are certainly very beautifully filmed and occasionally fairly thought-provoking (the death toll during World War I is estimated at over 17 million people including civilians), the film does fail to be a cohesive whole, and as some infuriated critics have pointed out, the makers mostly ignore important aspects of the larger context in which the film has been set, mainly the war, and the many issues surrounding it. While the movie is not quite a failure, one expects something better from a man who undoubtedly has a great deal more intuition than what the film conveys.
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