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A FUNDAMENTALLY SILLY FILM: ANOTHER PERSPECTIVE ON THE WATER DIVINER
Honest History, Australia
Jan 13 2015
Honest History President, Peter Stanley, reviews Russell Crowe's film,
The Water Diviner. Other material on the film, including links to
other reviews.
Spoiler alert! This review contains spoilers: if you don't want to
know, don't read on.
'Inspired by true events'? Well, yes; an unnamed Australian father
is indeed supposed to have turned up on Gallipoli after the war in
search of a dead son; there was a First World War; there were farmers
and wells in north-western Victoria ... But just about everything
else in The Water Diviner is made up and not very convincingly
either. As so often happens with historical films, the mistakes and
the misrepresentations could so easily have been avoided. This is
basically a silly film, full of impossibilities, and isn't worth the
attention it's getting.
Members of the Australian Historical Mission and Major Zeki Bey at
lunch on Hill 60, February-March 1919. Left to right: Herbert Buchanan;
Zeki Bey; Hubert Wilkins; CEW Bean; George Lambert (Australian War
Memorial A05258)
My criticisms of The Water Diviner as a filmed story revolve around
its fundamental lack of credibility. A bereaved father finds the
remains of two of his sons on the site of the fight for Lone Pine -
a place where, the film tells us, mistakenly, 7000 men were killed.
(Actually, that was the figure for total casualties - wounded as well
as deaths, both sides - but still it's ludicrous to think that finding
two bodies among that many was remotely possible.) Then he somehow
finds himself somewhere in Anatolia and senses the presence of his
surviving son, who has somehow made the transition from prisoner of
war to icon painter and Dervish. (Don't ask how he manages to both
paint Christian icons, in a ruined Greek church, and participate
in Islamic Sufi ritual. Why should you ask? The producers obviously
didn't.) Add the devices of corpse divining and coffee-ground readings
(not to mention the father finding the surviving son by merely sensing
his presence in a random bit of Anatolia) and you have a plot that
substitutes coincidences and credulity for plausibility. Excuse
the spoilers, but if they save you from going to see this load of
tosh you'll thank me when you see it for nothing on TV in a year or
so's time.
As a drama the execution is clunky and predictable. Of course,
we can see the romance developing between the widower Joshua and
the Turkish widow Ayshe from the moment they meet. Their candlelit
supper the night before Joshua is to be seen off from Constantinople
resembles nothing but a stylish coffee commercial and the cute kid
with astonishingly good English is just ridiculous. The film also
includes the philosophical exchanges between former enemies that we
have come to expect in films of this kind. 'Lieutenant-Colonel Hughes',
based on the real Australian war graves representative at Anzac, and
'Major Hasan', based on Zeki Bey, Charles Bean's Turkish informant,
duly share their reflections on the Tragedy of War. 'How much blood
do you need to make [a battlefield] holy?'; 'I don't know if I can
forgive any of us'. This is predictable and mostly just irritating.
So much for the unconvincing plot. But The Water Diviner is an
historical film and its historical gaffes begin in its opening
moments. We are shown Ottoman troops attacking the Anzac line on
20 December 1915, the morning after the allied evacuation of Anzac
and Suvla. It's a bright sunny, seemingly warm morning - men are
wearing just tunics and shirts - quite different to the freezing
dawn of Gallipoli in December. Strike one. The Turks attack, though
in reality they sent out patrols to investigate the unaccustomed
silence. Strike two. They find the famous 'drip guns', still not
firing ten or so hours after the Anzacs' departure (but the Anzacs'
ships are still close enough to be seen through binoculars). Strike
three, and the film isn't five minutes old.
At times The Water Diviner is an evocative portrayal of aspects of
Gallipoli: the claustrophobic hand-to-hand fighting in the covered
trenches of Lone Pine is depicted convincingly, indeed terrifyingly.
(That it culminates with an Australian shooting Turkish wounded is
a point in its favour.) It hints at the horror that such fighting
probably entailed. The agonised groans of the mortally wounded brother
are convincingly wrenching: full marks for truth-telling there.
Major Zeki Bey, lent by the Ottoman General Staff to the Australian
Historical Mission to Gallipoli in 1919 to provide information of the
campaign from the Turkish side. He had been at Gallipoli for much
of the Anzac occupation and was able to give first hand accounts
(Australian War Memorial ART2868/George Lambert)
But generally the film's writers, Andrew Knight and Andrew Anastasios,
simply haven't thought about the historical reality they are trying to
depict. Presumably they want us to find the story they tell convincing
- they tell us that it's 'inspired by true events', after all - but
they couldn't be arsed with the details. Of course, as an Australian
film it has to have a go at the silly-ass Pommy officer, who is baited,
given a horse named 'Widowmaker' when he asks for a mount.
This is so much par for the course in Australian war films that it's
barely worth mentioning. There are lots of relatively minor historical
errors, none especially important in themselves but collectively
demonstrating that once again film-makers basically are happy to
pillage history for 'stories' but can't be bothered to pay their dues
by getting it right.
For example, Joshua Connor's three sons are supposedly killed at
Lone Pine, on 7 August. They're in the 7th Battalion, but the 7th
Battalion didn't join the fight until 8 August. Alright, it's just
a day different, but it points to sloppy research; getting the right
date would have taken a minute to check.
Connor's youngest son is aged 17 years and 7 months, according to
the cross set up over his grave. This is well under-age: he shouldn't
have been allowed to go overseas until he turned 19 but he must have
embarked when he'd just turned 17. Of course, it was possible for
under-age youths to be accepted, with or without a parent's written
permission. (Would Joshua have given his permission? Perhaps - but
what would his wife have felt? The writers just haven't thought this
through.) But why introduce this complication at all, since instances
of soldiers that young were so rare? The film contributes needlessly
to the misconception that Australia's Gallipoli dead included under-age
youths - one in three of the Connor sons.
Does Russell Crowe especially like beards, besides his own? A British
soldier in Constantinople (a Scotsman in the Lancashire Fusiliers)
has one, as does Sergeant Tucker of the 4th Light Horse, supposedly
a member of the 'Imperial War Graves Unit' [sic] on Gallipoli in 1919.
British Empire soldiers weren't allowed to grow beards in the Great
War. Actually, this is even more odd. No battalion of the Lancashire
Fusiliers was ever in the division that occupied Constantinople;
a detail, but one easily checked. While there were Australian Light
Horsemen on Gallipoli in 1919, they were members of the 7th Light
Horse, not the 4th. Tucker describes being in the fight at Lone Pine
but the Light Horse took no part in that attack. These are fiddly
mistakes, of no relevance to the plot. But that's the point: with a
proper historical adviser they wouldn't have been made.
The film's only 'research' credit is to a Dr Meaghan Wilson-Anastasios,
presumably related to one of the writers and hardly a source of
independent advice, even if she possessed specialist expertise in
Gallipoli or the Great War, not to mention the complex post-war
situation of Turkey.
(Dr Wilson-Anastasios's website describes her as
a lapsed archaeologist who worked in Greece and the Middle East,
but now uses her PhD in art history and cultural economics to impart
knowledge to impressionable postgraduate students at the University
of Melbourne. It also comes in handy every now and then in her work
as a researcher and script writer for film and TV, if only to convince
producers that she might occasionally know what she's talking about.
One is tempted to add: 'enough said'.)
The Water Diviner, filmed partly in Turkey and produced with the
co-operation of the Turkish government, paints the Greeks as barbaric
invaders. That, of course, plays to Turkish nationalist mythology. But
it is certainly true that the Greeks invaded Anatolia in the wake
of the Great War and that atrocities were committed (on both sides,
though the film portrays them as being one-sided). The Greek troops
are dressed and act as murderous banditti, not as Evzones, who
wore a khaki military uniform and who operated as formed military
units. Some Greek troops did operate as banditti, as depicted in the
film, but the film-makers have basically reflected a Turkish view of
the Greek invasion.
Constantinople: panoramic view of the city in the 1870s as seen from
the Galata Tower (Wikimedia Commons)
Let me differ from some commentators in the Honest History community
and say that some aspects of the film that have caused offence didn't
bother me. As several people have mentioned, there isn't any reference
to the massacres of Armenians that were such an important part of
the last years of the Ottoman Empire. That's true, but it seems to me
that the Armenian agony simply has no relevance to the film's plot,
risible though the plot is. Ottoman and Turkish outrages against the
Armenian community deserve attention but The Water Diviner is a work
of fiction, not a history of post-war Turkey. Let's cut Russell Crowe
and his writers some slack.
But not too much slack because The Water Diviner has a ridiculously
implausible plot that along the way portrays several aspects of the
Great War and its aftermath in highly-coloured or misleading ways. We
ought to criticise both the writers and the director for failing in
their duty to do their jobs.
http://honesthistory.net.au/wp/a-fundamentally-silly-film-another-perspective-on-the-water-diviner/
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
Honest History, Australia
Jan 13 2015
Honest History President, Peter Stanley, reviews Russell Crowe's film,
The Water Diviner. Other material on the film, including links to
other reviews.
Spoiler alert! This review contains spoilers: if you don't want to
know, don't read on.
'Inspired by true events'? Well, yes; an unnamed Australian father
is indeed supposed to have turned up on Gallipoli after the war in
search of a dead son; there was a First World War; there were farmers
and wells in north-western Victoria ... But just about everything
else in The Water Diviner is made up and not very convincingly
either. As so often happens with historical films, the mistakes and
the misrepresentations could so easily have been avoided. This is
basically a silly film, full of impossibilities, and isn't worth the
attention it's getting.
Members of the Australian Historical Mission and Major Zeki Bey at
lunch on Hill 60, February-March 1919. Left to right: Herbert Buchanan;
Zeki Bey; Hubert Wilkins; CEW Bean; George Lambert (Australian War
Memorial A05258)
My criticisms of The Water Diviner as a filmed story revolve around
its fundamental lack of credibility. A bereaved father finds the
remains of two of his sons on the site of the fight for Lone Pine -
a place where, the film tells us, mistakenly, 7000 men were killed.
(Actually, that was the figure for total casualties - wounded as well
as deaths, both sides - but still it's ludicrous to think that finding
two bodies among that many was remotely possible.) Then he somehow
finds himself somewhere in Anatolia and senses the presence of his
surviving son, who has somehow made the transition from prisoner of
war to icon painter and Dervish. (Don't ask how he manages to both
paint Christian icons, in a ruined Greek church, and participate
in Islamic Sufi ritual. Why should you ask? The producers obviously
didn't.) Add the devices of corpse divining and coffee-ground readings
(not to mention the father finding the surviving son by merely sensing
his presence in a random bit of Anatolia) and you have a plot that
substitutes coincidences and credulity for plausibility. Excuse
the spoilers, but if they save you from going to see this load of
tosh you'll thank me when you see it for nothing on TV in a year or
so's time.
As a drama the execution is clunky and predictable. Of course,
we can see the romance developing between the widower Joshua and
the Turkish widow Ayshe from the moment they meet. Their candlelit
supper the night before Joshua is to be seen off from Constantinople
resembles nothing but a stylish coffee commercial and the cute kid
with astonishingly good English is just ridiculous. The film also
includes the philosophical exchanges between former enemies that we
have come to expect in films of this kind. 'Lieutenant-Colonel Hughes',
based on the real Australian war graves representative at Anzac, and
'Major Hasan', based on Zeki Bey, Charles Bean's Turkish informant,
duly share their reflections on the Tragedy of War. 'How much blood
do you need to make [a battlefield] holy?'; 'I don't know if I can
forgive any of us'. This is predictable and mostly just irritating.
So much for the unconvincing plot. But The Water Diviner is an
historical film and its historical gaffes begin in its opening
moments. We are shown Ottoman troops attacking the Anzac line on
20 December 1915, the morning after the allied evacuation of Anzac
and Suvla. It's a bright sunny, seemingly warm morning - men are
wearing just tunics and shirts - quite different to the freezing
dawn of Gallipoli in December. Strike one. The Turks attack, though
in reality they sent out patrols to investigate the unaccustomed
silence. Strike two. They find the famous 'drip guns', still not
firing ten or so hours after the Anzacs' departure (but the Anzacs'
ships are still close enough to be seen through binoculars). Strike
three, and the film isn't five minutes old.
At times The Water Diviner is an evocative portrayal of aspects of
Gallipoli: the claustrophobic hand-to-hand fighting in the covered
trenches of Lone Pine is depicted convincingly, indeed terrifyingly.
(That it culminates with an Australian shooting Turkish wounded is
a point in its favour.) It hints at the horror that such fighting
probably entailed. The agonised groans of the mortally wounded brother
are convincingly wrenching: full marks for truth-telling there.
Major Zeki Bey, lent by the Ottoman General Staff to the Australian
Historical Mission to Gallipoli in 1919 to provide information of the
campaign from the Turkish side. He had been at Gallipoli for much
of the Anzac occupation and was able to give first hand accounts
(Australian War Memorial ART2868/George Lambert)
But generally the film's writers, Andrew Knight and Andrew Anastasios,
simply haven't thought about the historical reality they are trying to
depict. Presumably they want us to find the story they tell convincing
- they tell us that it's 'inspired by true events', after all - but
they couldn't be arsed with the details. Of course, as an Australian
film it has to have a go at the silly-ass Pommy officer, who is baited,
given a horse named 'Widowmaker' when he asks for a mount.
This is so much par for the course in Australian war films that it's
barely worth mentioning. There are lots of relatively minor historical
errors, none especially important in themselves but collectively
demonstrating that once again film-makers basically are happy to
pillage history for 'stories' but can't be bothered to pay their dues
by getting it right.
For example, Joshua Connor's three sons are supposedly killed at
Lone Pine, on 7 August. They're in the 7th Battalion, but the 7th
Battalion didn't join the fight until 8 August. Alright, it's just
a day different, but it points to sloppy research; getting the right
date would have taken a minute to check.
Connor's youngest son is aged 17 years and 7 months, according to
the cross set up over his grave. This is well under-age: he shouldn't
have been allowed to go overseas until he turned 19 but he must have
embarked when he'd just turned 17. Of course, it was possible for
under-age youths to be accepted, with or without a parent's written
permission. (Would Joshua have given his permission? Perhaps - but
what would his wife have felt? The writers just haven't thought this
through.) But why introduce this complication at all, since instances
of soldiers that young were so rare? The film contributes needlessly
to the misconception that Australia's Gallipoli dead included under-age
youths - one in three of the Connor sons.
Does Russell Crowe especially like beards, besides his own? A British
soldier in Constantinople (a Scotsman in the Lancashire Fusiliers)
has one, as does Sergeant Tucker of the 4th Light Horse, supposedly
a member of the 'Imperial War Graves Unit' [sic] on Gallipoli in 1919.
British Empire soldiers weren't allowed to grow beards in the Great
War. Actually, this is even more odd. No battalion of the Lancashire
Fusiliers was ever in the division that occupied Constantinople;
a detail, but one easily checked. While there were Australian Light
Horsemen on Gallipoli in 1919, they were members of the 7th Light
Horse, not the 4th. Tucker describes being in the fight at Lone Pine
but the Light Horse took no part in that attack. These are fiddly
mistakes, of no relevance to the plot. But that's the point: with a
proper historical adviser they wouldn't have been made.
The film's only 'research' credit is to a Dr Meaghan Wilson-Anastasios,
presumably related to one of the writers and hardly a source of
independent advice, even if she possessed specialist expertise in
Gallipoli or the Great War, not to mention the complex post-war
situation of Turkey.
(Dr Wilson-Anastasios's website describes her as
a lapsed archaeologist who worked in Greece and the Middle East,
but now uses her PhD in art history and cultural economics to impart
knowledge to impressionable postgraduate students at the University
of Melbourne. It also comes in handy every now and then in her work
as a researcher and script writer for film and TV, if only to convince
producers that she might occasionally know what she's talking about.
One is tempted to add: 'enough said'.)
The Water Diviner, filmed partly in Turkey and produced with the
co-operation of the Turkish government, paints the Greeks as barbaric
invaders. That, of course, plays to Turkish nationalist mythology. But
it is certainly true that the Greeks invaded Anatolia in the wake
of the Great War and that atrocities were committed (on both sides,
though the film portrays them as being one-sided). The Greek troops
are dressed and act as murderous banditti, not as Evzones, who
wore a khaki military uniform and who operated as formed military
units. Some Greek troops did operate as banditti, as depicted in the
film, but the film-makers have basically reflected a Turkish view of
the Greek invasion.
Constantinople: panoramic view of the city in the 1870s as seen from
the Galata Tower (Wikimedia Commons)
Let me differ from some commentators in the Honest History community
and say that some aspects of the film that have caused offence didn't
bother me. As several people have mentioned, there isn't any reference
to the massacres of Armenians that were such an important part of
the last years of the Ottoman Empire. That's true, but it seems to me
that the Armenian agony simply has no relevance to the film's plot,
risible though the plot is. Ottoman and Turkish outrages against the
Armenian community deserve attention but The Water Diviner is a work
of fiction, not a history of post-war Turkey. Let's cut Russell Crowe
and his writers some slack.
But not too much slack because The Water Diviner has a ridiculously
implausible plot that along the way portrays several aspects of the
Great War and its aftermath in highly-coloured or misleading ways. We
ought to criticise both the writers and the director for failing in
their duty to do their jobs.
http://honesthistory.net.au/wp/a-fundamentally-silly-film-another-perspective-on-the-water-diviner/
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress