Four years ago, widowed Australian farmer Joshua Connor's (Russell Crowe) three sons enlisted to fight in the First World War and died together on the same August day during the notorious Gallipoli Campaign. Driven by desperate despair, he sails to Istanbul with the goal of finding his sons' bodies and returning home to give them the burial their late mother desired, but as a foreigner in a foreign land, he is rapidly embroiled in the intrigue and violence encircling the postwar partitioning of the Ottoman Empire. Crowe's handsome, if uneven directorial debut, The Water Diviner is masterful for its first 45 or so minutes. It nearly perfectly blends moments of old-fashioned adventure—one sequence, a memory, finds Connor and his horse racing to save his sons, caught in a sandstorm while hunting—with sobering antiwar cinema, including a haunting depiction of a soldier's prolonged, rasping, torturous final moments in no man's land. And it is fascinating to regard the military operation to recover and identify the thousands of bodies left behind in the aftermath of a key battle, its participants trying to reconcile pragmatism with hushed reverence. Alas, Crowe loses focus once the story moves forward from the war-torn peninsula, overcrowding his film with the sentimental and the tangential. The most egregious detour finds his brooding and masculine hero solemnly wooing an exotic, sad-eyed hotelier (Olga Kurylenko), culminating in a candlelit midnight dinner so clichéd and sudsy as to elicit a groan. This type of moment, a strained crowd-pleasing gesture, undercuts the moral gravity Crowe, as an actor and as a director, aims for and often achieves elsewhere.

B-