The Water Diviner (2015)

I could write an essay on Russell Crowe; the way he immerses himself so mythically into each character.  How valid and truthful his representations of each persona, etc, etc.  I could go on forever that I had no doubt in my devoted little mind that there would be no question he would make a great director, of the likes of Eastwood (Bridges of Madison County - 1995); imagining that much like me he must see the stories unravel in his head, laid before him like a picture book, scene by scene, play by play. 

What I did not expect was a story about unity, about love, about the kind of feelings that could only be so raw and clear when you know nothing else.  The kind of parental sense one acquires at the birth of a child; the one that common people like us experience when we first loose sight of a toddler in a room full of other people, when the sound of our own stands us to attention.  In the film, The Water Diviner, Joshua Connor, stands on the grave of his sons, in the hills of Gallipoli, on a mountain drenched  with unknown bodies.  He knows, in an unfathomable way, that his boys lay there, groundless, waiting to come home.    A moment in a film to be usually, characteristically criticised; much like the look of disbelief that overshadows the soldiers around him.  

This man, Connor, who travelled across oceans just to bring home the bones of his sons; this man, who had such an acute attachment to home and land that it seemed to me only plausible that he could find them.  Impossible actually, would have been his failure.

A story of journeys, of lost and found, of possibilities and expectations; The Water Diviner gave me a sense of belonging, a patriotic understanding that I have rarely found in war films. The sound of Edward in his last moments was more painfully honest than any other moment ever recalled, the flashback of that scene even more heartbreaking to conjure.  A loss unimaginable, a torture unseen. The reality, however, much like in a Wilfred Owen poem, shows that war is a time and a place over a landscape that will never see the world in the same way.  Moreover, though, that war affects people, families, cultures in ways unexpected and unwavering.  That individuals are immeasurably people, who follow a belief and hurt each other in the name of something or someone.  But who beneath the skin, the time and the place, are all the same, just human beings.  Capable of being friends, lovers, family, when no expectations are laid.

There is something that appears more truthful, more whole when the story we see or read about comes from another place, it cements its reality.  The novel, of the same name, written by Andrew Anastasious and Meaghan Wilson-Anastasious can be no less impacting than the film; searching for the reality of war, the aftermath of the reasoning and explanation for such loss.  But moreover to the honest hard look of what is left behind, and the steps we take, though perhaps not in the same degree as Joshua Connor, to come to terms and rest in peace the devastation and the loss.

He did not disappoint, Mr Crowe, he gave me a film that was honest, raw, mystical and romantic to boot.  The half cup of sugar in the coffee, was a perfect moment to leave a story that was not looking to find that kind of sentiment in a world shattered by loss, but that gave the audience hope to give a deserving character a touch of well earned happiness.

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