The Water Diviner

When his three sons die during the disastrous WWI campaign in the Dardanelles, Joshua Connor (Crowe) keeps himself busy by tending to his mentally unstable wife (Jacqueline Mackenzie, who starred in Romper Stomper with Crowe) and locating water beneath the desert that is his outback farm. When his wife dies, Connor makes for Turkey to locate his son’s bodies so they might be buried on home ground next to their mother. However, the politics at play halts any momentum and Connor gravitates towards Ayshe (Kurylenko), the owner of a small hotel, and her son Aham (Georgiades)…

For his directorial debut Russell Crowe opts for safety. The Australian can’t be faulted for keeping things solid and not colouring outside the lines but the heavy reliance on Screenwriting 101 techniques can steer that steady ship towards cliché and unoriginality.

For example, a sure-fire way to give events a bit of oomph is to put a clock on the story, but in this instance - Ayshe’s dead husband’s brother (Steve Bastoni) proposes marriage, a proposal she can’t turn down – it’s completely needless and tacked on. Then there’s the Turkish Bath scene, which has Crowe and his new Turk friends discuss important events in the nip; it might ‘strip’ Crowe of his old self so he can fully integrate with a new society but the scene itself looks completely stupid. Later, Crowe teaches cricket to his new Turk buddies (on a train of all places) to show that past grievances are put aside. And there’s a romantic candlelight dinner scene that’s really a serious fire hazard. Too obvious. Too safe.

But while the film creaks and moans under contrived storytelling, Crowe has a knack for pulling things together, following a hokey scene with a decent one (the war sequence, with the three injured brothers marooned in no man’s land, is a particularly memorable one). He understands that this is an old-fashioned story with a more mature audience in mind, who may enjoy seeing the predictable turns coming

However, with a burgeoning Turkish nationalist movement, the repelling of the Greek marauders, plus a third act twist, Crowe is guilty of squeezing too much in and maybe a mini-series would have suited the story more. Certainly the very tidy unfolding of events is more TV than the big screen.