All About - History - Hitler Versus Stain

HISTORY HOLLYWOOD
VS
Fact versus fiction on the silver screen
THE WATER DIVINER
Director: Russell Crowe Starring: RussellCrowe,OlgaKurylenko,JaiCourtneyCountry: Australia-USA Released: 2014
How much does this post-World War I drama rewrite history?
WHATTHEYGOTWRONG…
The film purports to be
01 “inspired by true events”
but it would be more accurate
to say “inspired by a single
apocryphal report of a father who
was found in Gallipoli looking
for his dead son.” There’s literally
nothing else to the story that the
111-minutes are based on.
The film opens with an
02 Ottoman attack on the
deserted Anzac positions on a
sunny day, with men clad in
tunics and shirts. The evacuation
took place December 1915 to
January 1916 and it was so cold
that soldiers suffered from
frostbite and hypothermia.
The first British soldier
03 that Russell Crowe’s
grieving father meets in
Constantinople sports a beard,
which is against regulations. Even
allowing for the fact fighting has
ended and everyone’s demobhappy,
it’s unlikely he’d be
boasting such a bountiful bush.
The film tells us that
04 7,000 men were killed
at the Battle for Lone Pine –
that’s actually closer to the
total number of casualties for
both sides, dead and wounded.
Also, one of the sons in the 7th
Battalion dies on 7 August, but
they didn’t fight on that day.
VERDICT Tonally it’s a bit Captain Corelli’s
Mandolin, but where Crowe got most of his history
from Peter Wier’s Gallipoli, Mandolin at least
engaged with the ugliness behind the romance.
WHATTHEYGOTRIGHT…
The political instability, demonstrations and
secret meetings in Constantinople are likely to
be a fair reflection of the atmosphere. Obviously
it’s romanticised and some of the darker aspects
of the era, such as the Armenian Genocide,
don’t get a look in, but there’s a real sense that a
volcano is bubbling away under the surface.
©Alamy
98