The Water Diviner: Emotional but slow drama

The Water Diviner
Starring: Russell Crowe, Olga Kurylenko, Jai Courtney, Cem Yilmaz, Yilmaz Erdogan
Rated: 6.5/10
Russell Crowe’s directorial debut comes piggyback on a potently emotional moment in Australian history, a war in far away Turkey which sewed up the nationalist sentiment Down Under, actually not just Australia but also New Zealand. Many Aussie young men were felled and many more went missing in this bloody battle in which more men were lost than one could imagine. The Battle of Gallipoli as it is called is the subject of Crowe’s latest drama which you can call arresting, sentimental, slow but potent in its own barren way.
Crowe keeps himself the central character of the film both before and behind the camera and you cannot fault him for the intensity either end. As a father of three sons he lost to the battle, as a husband of a wife he loves to distraction but has to deal with her suicide, as a relentless man in search of the unmarked graves of his three sons whom he wants back in his country to lie in peace next to their mother, there’s a lot of emotions he portrays in this film mounted on his journey to Gallipoli and actually find the remains of his son there after much struggle and hitch-hiking through the sea.
There are many moments in the film that might make the cynics believe that it is playing to the gallery but Crowe’s earnestness comes across on many fronts, including his effort to make his first film as director powerful enough for later projects. It is an arresting film whose slowness is brilliantly masked over by the cinematography and the storyline. Not to be missed. 
Source: Sunday Pioneer, 19 April, 2015

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