The Water Diviner
Last Hope

Russell Crowe’s directorial début, The Water Diviner (or Last Hope) is an Australian historical fiction drama set in the aftermath of WWI, specifically during the mass burials after the long and bloody Gallipoli Campaign. The film’s official release date, April 25th, coincides with the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Gallipoli’s beginning. Known as "Anzac Day," April 15th honors all the military casualties suffered by Australian and New Zealand veterans of foreign wars. The six-month long Gallipoli campaign looms large in the cinematic history of the two Pacific Island nations. Several acclaimed documentaries and fiction films tell the story of this fight—in which the Ottoman Empire ultimately defeated the Allied forces after both sides sustained heavy casualties on a barren peninsula of what is today modern Turkey. The most famous picture to chronicle these events is Peter Weir’s Gallipoli (1981), one of the most powerful films ever made about the futility of war.

Unfortunately, The Water Diviner does not belong in the august company of Weir’s masterpiece, nor with the other exceptionally well-crafted examples of Australian WWI pictures, like Bruce Beresford’s Breaker Morant (1980) or Simon Wincer’s The Lighthorsemen (1987). Instead the film belongs on a list of overblown historical epics made by and starring superstar actors turned first time directors. But unlike his contemporaries who’ve set out on this well blazed trail—Kevin Costner, Mel Gibson, Ben Affleck, etc.—Crowe can’t even make himself look good. His attempt to create an important patriotic picture comes off as a barely competent vanity project along the lines of John Wayne’s directorial début The Alamo (1960). 

Crowe shoots the picture like someone who’s never thought about directing a film before. His coverage is atrocious, forcing exceedingly jarring cuts that should be smooth or invisible. Though the location photography is beautiful—this is the final film shot by the late Andrew Lesnie (Babe, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Hobbit trilogy)—and the period detail is evocative, the compositions are pedestrian and the shot-to-shot relationships inept.

Crowe stars as Joshua Connor, an Australian farmer with the power to find water in the desert using divining rods. For five years he and his wife (Jacqueline McKenzie) have lived with the painful assumption their three sons were killed at Gallipoli along with so many other young men in the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. As the film opens, the loss is clearly too much for Connor’s wife to bear and—though screenwriters Andrew Anastasios and Andrew Knight provide us with no clue as to what makes this day different from the hundreds of other days she’s endured prior—she kills herself.  Conner buries her and swears he will find their sons, bring them home, and lay them alongside their mother’s grave.

After traveling to Istanbul, Connor is told by the British consul that Gallipoli is off limits to civilians because a massive operation to identify, separate, and rebury the remains of both the Allied and Ottoman soldiers is just getting underway. But nothing can dissuade Connor since he knows he can use his divining powers to find his sons, which, amazingly, he can. Several potentially interesting characters assist Connor, but none of them resonate. We get the feeling that if these specific folks had not turned up to help, someone else would. There is no real sense of risk, danger, or serious antagonism in the film because everyone is either deferential to Connor, wary of him, or in love with him. Any resistance he faces is no match for his iron will and determination. 

Equally problematic is the lack of dimension in the supporting roles. Since Crowe’s character is never out of the spotlight for a second, we’re robbed of connection with or insight into any of the people with whom he comes in contact. The ANZAC captain (Jai Courtney) tasked with finding and cataloging all of Galilpoli’s dead, and the Turkish officer (Yılmaz Erdoğan) assisting him in that herculean undertaking, are potentially fascinating characters—former enemies who must now work together in an unprecedented post-war effort on the same battlefield where they fought bitterly against each other. I’d like to see a movie about these two guys, but as bit players in this insignificant picture, all we glimpse is their reverential awe of Joshua’s determination to disrupt their important work.

Crowe’s potential love interest Ayshe, played by Olga Kurylenko (Quantum of Solace, Oblivion), is a European-educated Turkish hotelier whose missing husband was killed by Anzac troops. That’s an ideal conflict scenario for two star-crossed lovers, but we get few scenes of real connection between them, and Ayshe’s backstory serves little function other than to give Joshua someone to punch in the third act. 

The Water Diviner is, first and foremost, an historical romance. It’s not on the ambitious scale of epics like Gone with the Wind or Doctor Zivago, but rather the kind of small, interpersonal story set against major real-world events, which should illuminate specifics of an important chapter of the past.  Movies like this aren’t meant to be scholarly chronicles, but they ought to at least elicit curiosity in viewers about their time and place.   The Water Diviner offers little significant understanding of its period. All we get is the simple tale of a tragic hero’s search for his lost sons—which, since Joshua Connor is kind of “magical,” isn’t an especially difficult quest. Crowe and his writers squander all the potential for an interesting or historically significant picture.