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Cloudy "Water"

In Russell Crowe's directorial debut "The Water Diviner" an Australian farmer travels to Turkey four years after the 1915 Battle of Gallipoli to find the bodies of his sons and bring them home.

A water diviner as well as a farmer, Joshua Connor (Crowe) finds water underground with dowsing rods and his own mysterious sixth sense. In manly Aussie fashion, he can single-handedly dig and reinforce a well in a single day. "You can find water but you can't even find your own children," says his grief-stricken wife, Eliza (Jacqueline McKenzie). It is to honor her dying wish that Connor leaves for Turkey.

Connor's self-reliance is undermined immediately, as a mischievous boy Orhan (Dylan Georgiades) leads Connor through the streets of Istanbul to the hotel run by his mother Ayshe (Olga Kurylenko). Ayshe is conveniently both widowed and looks like a model. She can see his romantic future in a cup of coffee, but you won't need special powers to divine this part of the story.

The movie's sporadic touch of magical realism continues on the former battlegrounds of Gallipoli, where the Turks and the Brits are now working together to identify the remains of their war dead. Here Connor's ability to find water transforms into an ability to find the spot where his sons fell (he uses bullets instead of dowsing rods, but may as well be using magic wands). He also finds an unlikely ally in Turkish officer Major Hasan (Yilmaz Erdogan) and hope to keep looking.

"The Water Diviner" roughly navigates the blurred landscape of Turks, Greeks, and Brits, while the bigger WWI-era picture is unseen. Unflinching flashbacks of brothers Arthur (Ryan Corr), Henry (Ben O'Toole) and Edward (James Fraser) in battle succeed in depicting suffering and senseless loss without taking sides or glorifying war. In this way, the movie feels strangely both personal and universal, but not political.

Though its genre might be unclear, "The Water Diviner" is clearly a labor of love. Like water changing from liquid to solid to gas, the movie changes from family drama to action movie to romance. That's not as jarring as it sounds, however, due to Crowe's understated but steady presence both in-front of and behind the camera. Ultimately, this water may not taste right but it's safe to drink.