Russell Crowe directs, stars in 'The Water Diviner'

THE DIRECTOR of "The Water Diviner," it is obvious, did not take the star of the movie aside and suggest that he drop a few pounds.

Perhaps because director and star are one in the same: Russell Crowe, who as seen here would have a hard time fitting into his "Gladiator" tunic.

But he's not dodging chariots and fighting tigers. He's playing a middle-aged rancher named Connor, lodged in rural Australia, living with an unhappy wife in a house haunted by emptiness.

The couple has lost three sons to World War I, killed by Turkish forces at the notorious battle of Gallipoli in 1915 (this is one of several films made to coincide with its 100th anniversary).

The movie begins a few years after the war's end. Connor's wife is inconsolable in her grief, and so he makes a promise to find his sons remains and return them to the ranch.

This is an improbable errand - his sons are among tens of thousands killed in several months of trench fighting, leaving bodies on top of bodies, enemy upon adversary.

But Connor makes his way to occupied Turkey, bluffs his way past British army bureaucracy, and hikes out to the battlefield, where Turkish officer Hasan (Yilmaz Erdogan) and an Australian officer (Jai Courtney) share the gruesome job of sifting through the remains and identifying bodies.

Connor has no business being there, but his diligence and paternal determination strike a chord with both the Turks and the Aussies. Hasan in particular takes a liking to the Connor, a relationship given heft by the masculine chemistry between the two actors.

There is an element of mysticism to all of this - the title refers to Connor's purported ability to find water in dry places, and he uses these skills to somehow find his boys dogtags amid the rubble, a near-supernatural element that director Crowe manages to blend with movie's grim realities (a realism helped by handsome on-location shooting in Turkey).

From there, though, "The Water Diviner" takes some strange detours, and the storytelling demands of the sprawling epic get to be too much for Crowe. A romance with a Turkish widow (Olga Kurylenko) seems consistently misjudged.

He's on firmer ground with the bond between Hasan and Connor - the Aussie asks his host what he did before the war, and Hasan replies, "We are Turks, there is no before the war."

That's a grim reference to the embattled history of the Ottoman Empire, and to the violent spasms that accompanied its dissolution.

Some have objected that "The Water Diviner" does not go far enough in cataloguing the full horror of this violent collapse.

But that seems outside the scope of Crowe's story, which is more sharply focused on the particular agonies that befall the lives of those whose sons and daughters are killed or missing in action.