The Water Diviner

There is scenic beauty to spare in Russell Crowe’s flawed but touching The Water Diviner. The film—apparently based on fact, however loosely—traces the journey of an Australian farmer named Joshua Connor in 1919 to Gallipoli. Connor is trying to recover the bodies of his three sons, all of whom were part of ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) and were (to the best of his knowledge) killed together in battle (during the 1915 Gallipoli campaign which left thousands of troops dead on both sides). Crowe also directed the film, with a surprisingly subtle hand, particularly in crafting battle scenes and in showcasing the landscape that situates his story, be it the austere terrain of the Australian desert or the sumptuous blues and greens of the Mediterranean and Turkey. Crowe’s light touch doesn’t always work for the film: there are moments when it feels lacking in emotional weight, despite the compelling elements of the story which would seem to defer such weight almost as a matter of course.

My knowledge of World War I is fairly limited, and my knowledge of the skirmish at Gallipoli and its aftermath even more so. But even I felt more than a little skeptical about some of the cultural and political aspects of The Water Diviner. Somehow, Crowe’s film feels too blissfully easy in its understanding of cultural divides. Crowe’s good-natured, politically neutral farmer, Joshua Connor, begins his search in Istanbul, and when he arrives, an eager young boy nabs his luggage and lures him to the out-of-the-way hotel run by his widowed mother Ayshe (played by Olga Kurylenko). Naturally, she’s put off by Joshua Connor, since he represents the Anglo enemies who slaughtered so many of her own people (including her husband, although she refuses to admit his death because it might obligate her to marry his brother, a calculating, somewhat sleazy man). Nevertheless, a fragile kinship—and romance—is obviously in the works. And even though the film ultimately leaves this development open to interpretation, its inclusion feels more than a bit precious, like a Hallmark movie found its way into an otherwise tough-minded film about the tragedy of war.

I appreciate that The Water Diviner is ultimately proclaiming a message of togetherness. The characters in this film have felt the torrent of war in the most direct and painful ways imaginable. But a movie that so conveniently unites two warring cultures by contriving a romance between two people from those cultures, feels a bit calculated, like finely processed treacly Hollywood goo. It goes down so easy. But there’s also a romanticized portrait of the Turks which left me feeling skeptical about the film’s historical insight.

And yet, this movie is likable and effective and refreshingly subtle in so many ways. Crowe’s depiction of conflict is one of the most understated we’ve seen in Western movies of the last decade. We see flashes of the battle Connor’s sons fought in Gallipoli, all of them technically pretty dazzling and viewer-friendly. We can tell what is happening in the action, and the sounds of the guns feel loud in that antiquated way, not like computerized modern recreations. The battles are also not drawn out: they’re more like flecks of memory, only Connor doesn’t remember them; he’s imagining them, or we’re getting them as a kind of dreamlike retroactive vision. They are well-staged, efficient, powerful, and haunting.

And to his credit, Russell Crowe doesn’t try to milk the audience or give himself blustering actor-y moments. His character—obviously grief-stricken not just by the loss of all three of his sons but the recent suicide of his wife—is broken. He’s been stripped of the things that we’ve been told are being protected by aggressive military force. The Great War for him isn’t a roar of victory; it’s a wail of personal loss. In one of the most heartbreaking moments of the film, we see Joshua Connor’s sons, all of them apparently mortally wounded, one in particular issuing a guttural moan that goes on for hours; his brother, the least wounded of the three (the third is already dead) cries out, knowing he can do nothing to save his brothers or himself, and feeling the weight of this great tragedy in a very literal sense as he lies under the broken bodies of his brothers.

That’s a powerful image. There are many of them in The Water Diviner. And yet, these images are marred somewhat by the film’s cheap satisfaction. Perhaps this is a result of what feels like rushed storytelling. I’ve never been one to complain about a movie being too short, but are moments in The Water Diviner that feel clumsily staged as though the filmmakers were in a hurry and didn’t have the finesse to dramatize what they wanted in the right way. This is surely—at least in part—the mark of a first-time director. Crowe makes up for these oversights by his willingness to soak in the surroundings of the many places Connor travels.

And even though the film feels at times like a cultural field trip conducted by an overly optimistic and more than slightly misinformed guide, its intentions are admirable. To his credit, Crowe does make an effort to depict the complexities at work between the two cultures at the heart of the film: the Anglos and the Ottomans. Connor is aided more than once by a Turkish military officer (Yilmaz Erdogan)—who’s been enlisted by Australian military officials to help them recover their dead soldiers, because he’s familiar with the landscape and the trajectory of the battles. But this is part of the problem: the film feels naïve in its forced togetherness. The actors lend some credibility to problematically noble intentions. And I can’t overstate my gratitude for a movie about war that makes an effort to be subtle and thoughtful and relatively light on explosions (for a summer movie).

With Jai Courtney, Ryan Corr, Dylan Georgiades, Jacqueline McKenzie, James Fraser, and Ben O’Toole. 

Hot Pursuit

A lousy Rotten Tomatoes score should not keep us from seeing Hot Pursuit. Its dismal 5% rating on the Tomatometer once again proves that consensus is not everything. Consensus certainly should never be the deciding factor in how we experience a movie, because lots of people can be wrong. Hot Pursuit may be flawed, but it is comedy dynamite that gets the “buddy movie” right and provides plumb roles for its two stars, Reese Witherspoon and Sofía Vergara. The film isn’t perfect structurally, but it’s bursting with well-crafted scenes that build on the relationship between the two leads, it’s finely tuned and generous and light and often laugh-out-loud funny.

Reese Witherspoon conjures up memories of Holly Hunter’s plucky police woman in Raising Arizona, as well as Amy Poehler’s indefatigable Leslie Knope in Parks and Recreation. Witherspoon plays Officer Rose Cooper, an exceedingly literal-minded, by-the-book San Antonio cop with a Texas twang. Cooper has memorized all the police codes and spouts them out like a mantra when she’s stressed; she can recite the law and the statutes from memory; her uniform is impeccably neat and shiny. But no one respects her, because she cares too much.

It is this intense, totally authentic dedication to her job and the overflow of passion she has for it which bind her to Leslie Knope from Parks and Rec. The difference between them is that Leslie Knope has a team of supporters balancing her bubbly, singular insanity, while Officer Cooper is basically a loner, alienated from the rest of the world because of her intense personality. In the opening scene of the film, we see her chasing a fleeing man because he ran out on a date; she’s possibly the scariest thing an insecure heterosexual man will ever encounter: a confident woman with a gun and a badge.

However, Officer Cooper (or just, Cooper) really scares people off because she isn’t a smooth operator; she doesn’t know how to bullshit, and fluffy conversation—the stuff so many of us rely on in order to gradually get to know other people—is not her forte. She is too focused on tasks for small talk. When riding in the car with a big, tall U.S. marshal who tells her to try not to fall in love with him, she responds: “10-4. Oh. That was a joke, wasn’t it.”

Reese Witherspoon is an actress who has often played the dumb blond in lackluster Hollywood comedies; there’s nothing wrong with playing a dumb blond unless you get stuck in that role forever. Fortunately, Witherspoon has shown us a wider range of acting chops, and now she’s playing a more complex kind of comic character, one who is smart and good and honest but also kind of ridiculous and even annoying, and it’s a much more engaging, physical, and hilarious performance we get as a result. Witherspoon maintains the integrity of her character while happily letting herself look silly, sometimes being left out of a joke because she’s so serious, so tense, so committed to giving 150%.

The plot is standard Hollywood comedy formula: Officer Cooper is sent to escort jewel-encrusted Columbian diva Danielle Riva (Sofía Vergara), the wife of a drug lord, to Dallas so she can testify against the leader of a large drug cartel who is currently in jail. But things go wrong, as they tend to do in these movies, and Witherspoon and Vergara take it on the lam with both drug lords and police chasing after them.

Sofía Vergara’s performance is delicious. She sounds like a Columbian Fran Drescher (which may grate on some people’s nerves); she’s like a Redwood standing next to the petite Cooper, especially because she’s sporting a pair of wedges that are worth more than a suburban house. Vergara apes the stereotypes aimed at Hispanic women and rich women: she’s a tall, curvy, stylish, materialistic woman on the outside; but she’s also intuitive and smart, and uses the stereotypes to her advantage, maintaining a subtle control over the various insane situations the movie throws at her. Vergara is also impressively in command of herself as a physical performer. She doesn’t resort to klutziness for comedy, and she gets great mileage out of picking on poor, diminutive Reese Witherspoon. “Get down!” Cooper yells when they’re being shot at; “It is farther for me!” Mrs. Riva retorts.

The interplay between these two women is often delightful. The director, Anne Fletcher, takes time to fashion scenes so that the gags build on each other. In one scene, the ladies are trying on clothes at a gas station, and Vergara puts Witherspoon in a sexy red number that utterly clashes with her character. Officer Cooper groans, “I feel like the cheese fell off my cracker.” Despite the fact that the movie does not always hold up around them, these two actresses take command of the screen and make the movie work for them. I can forgive a lot for such terrific comic performances. I can only hope that this movie finds the audience it deserves.

With Matthew Del Negro, Michael Mosley, Robert Kazinsky, John Carroll Lynch, Richard T. Jones, and Jim Gaffigan (in a funny bit as a farmer). Written by David Feeney and John Quaintance.

True Story

True Story wants very much to understand the evil that men do, but it’s too superficial to dig deep enough into its subject. The film is based on an actual case, that of convicted murderer Christian Longo. Longo was given the death penalty for the 2001 murders of his wife and three young children. The film chronicles the strange relationship that develops between Longo (played by James Franco) and a disgraced ex-New York Times reporter named Mike Finkel (played by Jonah Hill). Finkel has just been let go from his post at the Times because he fabricated part of a story he wrote about the African slave trade. After returning to his home in Montana and his wife (Felicity Jones), who works in the library of a university, Finkel discovers that Longo used his name whilst a fugitive from justice. Intrigued, Finkel reaches out to Longo in prison. And here’s where the movie loses me. When Finkel first encounters Longo, he tells the suspected murderer that he can relate to Longo because “he’s been through a trial of his own,” and he wanted to know “what it was like to be me.” Longo is obviously thrilled to be the subject of a vulnerable reporter’s curiosity—not to mention Finkel’s ticket to career salvation. And Finkel becomes enamored of Longo in very creepy and incredulous ways.

I haven’t read Finkel’s book about his relationship with Longo; nor am I familiar with the details of the actual murder case and subsequent trial. But the film documents an exchange that is hard to take. The writers—David Kajganich and Rupert Goold (Gold also directed)—are trying to explore the complex range of emotions at play here: On the one hand, Finkel has been publicly humiliated for falsifying information; his reputation is marred and he desperately needs a good story to revive his career; this makes Finkel vulnerable to the manipulations of a sociopath (assuming Longo is actually guilty). Meanwhile, there is the question of Longo’s guilt. Did he really do the unthinkable? Or is he just the perfect wrongfully accused man, nailed to the wall by circumstantial evidence and motive? Finkel stands to gain here too: He might be the one person to believe the innocent man, thus preventing another senseless death if Longo is acquitted of the five murders he is accused of committing.

These are fascinating ideas, but the movie doesn’t seem equipped to handle them with any finesse or curiosity. The relationship between Longo and Finkel is clumsily established with a montage sequence. I wish there had been scenes of Finkel spotting Longo while he did push-ups, set to some amped-up 80s power song by the likes of Men at Work or Duran Duran. The movie might have worked better as a spoof of crime dramas than the real thing. But that may also be the fact that we’re seeing two actors who have been associated with comedy for so long now trying to break out of that mold and do something different.

I won’t dispute their acting skills. Both Franco and Hill are strong performers. But there’s nothing else underneath those performances. The film doesn’t really event capture the tingling mysteriousness that pervades strong examples of this genre. We’re never immersed in the film the way that we should be. And moments of bad dialogue and seemingly odd, incredulous character choices only mar an already muddled film.