The Ideological Content Analysis 30 Days Putsch:

30 Reviews in 30 Days

DAY TWENTY-THREE

The idea with The Water Diviner seems to have been to mix the Merchant Ivory period prestige formula with a few rugged adventure story components and just a dash of New Age inanity, the end result feeling something like The English Patient’s underachieving kid brother. Russell Crowe, who also directs, plays an Australian farmer whose three sons are believed to have died in Churchill’s disastrous Gallipoli sideshow of the First World War. After his wife commits suicide, Crowe becomes obsessed with the fool’s errand of reclaiming his three boys’ remains and so journeys to the recently deceased Ottoman Empire, where, against the backdrop of rising Turkish nationalism, he becomes personally involved with a native widow (Olga Kurylenko) and her son (Dylan Georgiades).

Beginning as a compelling character study, The Water Diviner deteriorates in its middle portion into a misguided romantic drama before finally turning into something of an action movie, so that the tone is a bit inconsistent, the storytelling atmospherically disjointed. Still, notwithstanding the sometimes obnoxious stylistic flourishes like the gratuitous dream-vision whirling dervishes and a flurry of probably symbolic papers being thrown dove-like from a balcony, Crowe’s feature film debut as director is much more good than bad, and its heart is frequently in the right place.

3.5 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that The Water Diviner is:

3. Irreligious. The local cleric displays no sympathy when Crowe loses his wife and even has the nerve to extort an extravagant donation from him in his grief. Crowe later says he regrets filling his sons’ heads with rhetoric about God and king and country. Turkish women are depicted as feeling stifled by their Islamic culture.

2. Pro-miscegenation. Crowe’s interracial romance with the Turkish widow presents a Coudenhove-Kalergi model for the abolishment of international conflict.

1. Anti-war. Where The Water Diviner succeeds is in depicting both the physical and – more particularly – the psychological carnage of armed conflict. The scene of Crowe’s bullet-riddled sons bleeding to death on the battlefield is highly effective. One wishes, however, that the screenplay had been so bold as to name ZOG champion Winston Churchill as the author of the Gallipoli disaster in his capacity as First Lord of the Admiralty.

Rainer Chlodwig von Kook

Have shopping to do and want to support icareviews? The author receives a modest commission on Amazon purchases made through this link: http://amzn.to/1N63xWR