Russell Crowe’s The Water Diviner opened in US cinemas to a wave of criticism last month – its appallingly mistimed launch coinciding with the centenary of the Armenian Genocide.
Its inappropriate release date in the US has added insult to injury for the film’s growing number of critics – mostly Armenian and Greeks united in their anger at what Greek Australian academic Panayiotis Diamadis described as the film’s “genocide denial by omission”.
In a letter to Warner Brothers, American Armenian film producers Garin Hovannisian and Alec Mouhibian said the American release of The Water Diviner in April could only be viewed “as complicity in the denial of the worst crime ever imagined” and that it should be “met with the offense and outrage it deserves”.
Hovannisian and Mouhibian’s film commemorating the Armenian Genocide of 1915 was also released last month.
Beyond the outrage over the timing of The Water Diviner’s American release, the film’s dewy-eyed interpretation of Turkey’s actions during WWI – along with inferences such that the Ottoman Empire was a blameless victim of western aggression – has incensed many.
The script’s ‘editing out’ of any mention of Turkish atrocities committed against Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks during and after WWI has caused most offence.
In the film, Russell Crowe – who also directs – plays Joshua Connor, a Victorian farmer who travels to Turkey after the war to find the bodies of his three Anzac sons, all believed to have fallen at Gallipoli.
The story – co-written by Andrew Anastasios and Andrew Knight – goes on to reflect a Turkish version of WWI and its immediate aftermath, including conflict with Greece during the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922.
Made on budget of $22.5 million, The Water Diviner was the top-grossing home-grown movie of 2014 in Australia.
In a letter-writing campaign soon after the film was released, many in the Greek and Armenian diaspora writing from Australia, the US, Israel, Germany and elsewhere expressed outrage at the film’s depiction of events – particularly a scene in which what appear to be Greek bandits attack a Turkish military train, as well as omitting any reference to atrocities carried out by Turkey in 1919, when Crowe’s character is in Anatolia.
Historian Professor Peter Stanley believes that rather than a conscious distortion of history, the film’s problem lies in the fact that Russell Crowe “entered a highly contested historical arena … without any idea of what he was getting into”.
“His response was to simply roll over and accept the Turkish version.”
The UNSW Canberra professor told Neos Kosmos that Crowe had “blundered” into the depiction of the situation in Anatolia “like a bull in a china shop”.
“I think he could have done a much better job of depicting the history faithfully and fairly … but like a lot of Australians, he was captivated by the Turkish national epic and basically came down on that side of telling the story.”