The Water Diviner

Watching this last night, I was struck by how much of it was familiar. I must have watched it at some point - unsurprising since my dad apparently loves it - but I can't recall when.

Russell Crowe plays a grieving father and widower who travels to Turkey in the years after World War I to try and find the bodies of his three sons, who were among the many Australian or New Zealander troops who died at Gallipoli. He manages to navigate through the bureaucratic red tape thanks to stubbornness and a few people deciding they'll make an exception for him, including a Turkish major (Yilmaz Erdogan) who led the defense (who points out that yes, there are many fathers who lost sons, but Crowe is the only one who came all this way to try and find them.)

In and around that, Crowe's staying in a small hotel run by a young Turkish widow, Ayshe (Olga Kurylenko), and her son. Her husband also died at Gallipoli, so she's not terribly fond of Crowe to start. She's also fending off her brother-in-law's offer to become his second wife. Crowe blunders into the middle of this and causes some difficulties, although we don't see most of the fallout she experiences because Crowe leaves town pursuing another lead and the story goes with him.

So it's about grief and how people process it. Crowe's wife had one form of denial, Ayshe has another, although they're both trying to keep things as they were before, just at different levels of disconnect from reality. Crowe's trying to handle it "like a man", by focusing on doing something. "Something" in this case definitely not "dealing with his feelings." Major Hasan is helping Crowe I think as a way to deal with having a hand in all these deaths. They fought this war - which by this point has gone from the Ottoman Empire versus the British to the Turks versus the Greeks - and it's still going and it doesn't look like there was any point. People call him Hasan the Assassin, that can't be a great thing to carry around. So help this one Aussie find some closure.

There are a lot of scenes of people going underground, or shots where someone is descending and we watch them from above. Crowe finds water by sensing it out and digging, and there's ultimately going to be digging to unearth his sons' locations. But he also follows Major Hasan into an underground meeting place when he's hoping for information. It leads him to a group of people preparing to go fight the Greeks, but it also eventually gets him where he wants to go. He has to escape by diving down a cistern into an underground river at one point.

There are a lot of shots of him leaving the British War Office after being handed some bad news, and we watch from the ceiling as he makes his way down. But that usually leads him to another way forward, via either Ayshe or Hasan. He went up to try and get help from the British, who he might reasonably expect would fucking help someone from their Commonwealth, but actually has success when he goes the other direction and asks people who have no reason to want to help this man, who sent his three sons off to serve God and Country by invading their country.