The Water Diviner Russell Crowe S Directorial Debut Is A Rocky One

It always fascinates me whenever a well-known actor decides to step into the director’s chair. The results aren’t always good, but they’re more often than not interesting, since moving behind the camera is often done because it’s a film that the actor personally wants to see get made. In the case of The Water Diviner, which marks the directorial debut of Russell Crowe, you can feel the love for the project from start to finish. Unfortunately, love isn’t a substitute for talent, and Crowe does not show much of that – at least as the film’s director – in The Water Diviner. In fact, many of the film’s problems are directorial. It’s an inconsistent movie at best that takes so many tonal turns as it progresses. The story sees Joshua Connor (Crowe), an Australian farmer who lost his three sons during WWI and whose wife has now also passed, head to Turkey in order to locate his sons’ bodies and bring them back to his home so they can be buried with his wife. A noble pursuit that is based on true events, I’m sure. It’s too bad we get sidetracked with a horrible obligatory romance with a hotel owner (Olga Kurylenko), out-of-place action scenes, and random flashbacks to the war. It all adds up to very little. “War is bad,” you see. While Crowe is good in the lead role, he’s really the only actor who is, in large part because the screenplay doesn’t give much for the other actors to work with. Olga Kurylenko is an obligatory love interest, Dylan Georgiades is the kid, Yilmaz Erdogan is the sidekick, and Jai Courtney gets a funny-looking mustache that fails to cover up how uncharismatic and shallow an actor he is. It’s Crowe’s movie, through and through – for better or for worse. The Water Diviner is a rocky start to the directorial career of Russell Crowe. It’s an uneven effort whose screenplay doesn’t help him out any. Spurts of brilliance are undercut by stupidity, a lack of character depth, and jarring tonal shifts. It might interest students studying the Battle of Gallipoli, but for anyone else it’ll largely be a waste of time. Bottom Line: A preposterous story that gets muddled with tonal shifts, The Water Diviner isn’t a successful directorial debut for Russell Crowe. Recommendation: Students studying the Battle of Gallipoli might be the only group for whom The Water Diviner will be useful. [rating=2]