the Water Diviner: (2014. dir: Russell Crowe) Directing yourself is never easy, and Crowe does his best to avoid problems by keeping his performance simple and straightforward. The story is mixed: the interesting part tells the flip-side of the Gallipoli story, a deep scar in Australian history, an ill-conceived WWI campaign in which 36,000 ANZAC troops were lost or wounded. If you're American, you learned about it from the Peter Weir movie. If you're Australian, I assume it's ingrained in you as cultural heritage from earliest youth. This story looks at it from the Turkish angle, beginning in a trench where soldiers are preparing to die, but it's a trick, a mirror image of Weir's trench in which the Australians are pinning their photographs and final letters to the shorings before they run to their deaths: this time, it's the Turks doing the same thing, but when they reach the crest of the hill, they find the enemy has retreated.
It's the story of a farmer, a sensitive autodidact and preternaturally gifted water-dowser, who has lost all three sons on the Turkish peninsula and his wife as a later casualty of the same battle. In deference to her last wishes, he travels to Turkey to find the bodies of his sons and bring them home.
The story incorporates magical realism, as when he "intuits" the final moments of his boys as he walks across the ground which drank their blood, this without the film actually committing to a vision of reality in which there is an invisible dimension. The suggestion is, rather disturbingly, that this farmer loves his children more fully and successfully than us mere mortals do, and that's why he's able to follow their long-buried traces, while the rest of us are plagued by unanswered questions when we lose our own loved ones. The visuals are heightened into hyper-reality, as well: when he reaches Istanbul, the scarlets and yellows are saturated to an extreme, as if everything has been carved out of saffron and turmeric.
Most of the movie's flaws and saccharine sentimentality (there's an adorable Turkish urchin who has two jobs: to provide a conduit through which his ridiculously gorgeous mother falls in love with our aging, unprepossessing hero, and to administer the emotional blackmail that underhandedly plucks at our heartstrings) might be forgiven when weighed against the good (the bits about war feel fully and well done), except for the unforgivable love story. There is good acting in this movie (Yilmaz Erdogan, particularly, as the Turkish officer, and Ryan Corr as the eldest son), but not, alas, by Olga Kurylenko, whose character, in her defense, may be unplayable as written.
She is a Turkish war-widow who accepts that her dead husband's brother has the right to wallop her, and yet is a Strong and Independent Woman, as trademarked by Hollywood. There is probably a bridge between the two extremes, but Kurylenko and Crowe either could not find it, or failed to communicate it if they did. Crowe takes cliched shortcuts in mapping the Woody Allen-flavored romance (Crowe was 5O at the time, Kurylenko 34, and she looks younger than that, upping the ick-factor): syrupy music over a candlelit supper, at which my boyfriend wryly pointed out that if she were really a widow at the close of World War I, she wouldn't waste a hundred candles on a single supper, even if she had a hundred candles. The amorous brother-in-law who begins as an obstacle magically vanishes by the end, and with him any cultural obstacles, like, say, that the Turkish men, who are still at war against Britain, would kill our hero and probably her as well for sleeping with the enemy rather than allow the romance. You have to figure that even if our hero managed to spirit his lady-love and her absurdly cuddlesome son back to Australia, the union would still be villified by his own people in their postbellum xenophobia, and is this Strong and Independent(TM) Muslim woman going to be happy in the Australian bush? Yikes. Not likely. A happy ending, as someone wise once pointed out, is a story that's not finished yet. This one, though, just feels forced and false.
a Winter's Tale: (2014. dir: Akiva Goldsman) Ah, true love, true love. Always predestined, immediately recognizable, instantly cleansing away the flaws and sins of those who find it. The altar at which Hollywood worships.
This is a New Age fairy tale, lifted soggily above a slough of saccharine hogwash and held there, barely, by good performances and some lush photography. Its theology is dunderheaded, because in Hollywood, the only way to experience God is through true romance or parental love. The only third option is disinterested samaritanism, but Hollywood is uncomfortable with it and tends to make those folks into angelic figures.
It's long and slow, but Russell Crowe has some fun finding the tics and nuances of his villainous demon, and the only performance that falls flat, interestingly, is from Will Smith, who is an entirely unconvincing Lucifer, possibly because he can't help exuding so powerful a nice-guy charisma.
I do dig it at the end, when the bad guy turns into ice. Nice effect.
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