5/10
Russell Crowe makes his directoral debut, and stars as a quencer of thirsts in ‘The Water Diviner’. Set in Gallipoli in 1919 at the end of World War I, An Australian man (Russell Crow) travels to Turkey after the Battle of Gallipoli to try and locate his three missing sons. After his wife’s suicide, the hope to find the missing boys is all he has left in his very blank life. There is a lot here to praise Crowe for. Generally, it comes in a stylish cinematography choice with a dusty background representing the battles that have taken place, and the dust refusing to settle from the lives of soldiers lost while defending their country. Russell has a great eye for the backgrounds and landscapes that make a movie like this feel epic, but the movie’s cliche actions and bizarre obsurdity with a couple of scenes that don’t fit, really weigh his debut down for a viewing audience. The film is very dry in the literal and figuritive sense. The former meaning that the film has two scenes which shows our main character either digging a water hole, or explaining the art of it to people he meets. It never quite comes across that this man is an expert in the field, or that it is anything above just a hobby for him in a country like Australia that doesn’t get much water. In the figuritive sense, the film’s pacing is weighed down by a story that doesn’t get interesting until the biggest moments are revealed in the final twenty minutes. By then, i was so weighed down by boredom that i almost wished for more of those scenes that don’t exactly fit into a character’s motivation for his journey. For example, Crowe is on a train in one scene with a Turkish army on his way to find his child. In the scene before, Crowe is torn apart and then put back together when he has a dream that his son is still alive. If this notion isn’t bizarre enough for the film’s down to earth feel, he begins to teach the Turkish soldiers how to play cricket aboard a moving train. It just never fits even if it is trying to lighten the mood in a traumatizing storyline. The plot itself is good enough to capture the intrigue of the audience, but i felt that it’s reveals could’ve been done a little bit at a time, and not all in the final twenty minutes of a movie that already feels like thirty minutes too long. I did enjoy the designs for wardrobe, and the orchestral score by composer, David Hirschfelder, was musical narration for the long shots of mountains and blue skies as far as the eye can see. Overall, ‘The Water Diviner’ is a double edged sword. One that’s too large a tale for such an intimate drama, yet too small a narrative direction for the enormous frame that it hopes to fill. It’s got the visuals of Oscar bait, but too many varying factors ever keep this story from flowing up stream.