User Reviews

Life's a game, death's a game. This playful little movie is all about games. If you're not a gaming-type person, you might not find this, umm, diverting.

The thoroughly surreal and tongue-in-cheek tone of the movie keeps us from taking it very seriously...all of which is for the best, since that way we don't confuse the plot with serious drama; the games the women play tend toward the homicidal....

Wittgenstein famously pointed out that there are all manner of games in the world--there's no tight set of identifying characteristics; games all have, at most, a "family resemblance". Greenaway has here collected numerous far-flung relatives in this odd family. You'll no doubt appreciate some of them more than others, Well, we all inevitably have favorites.

DbN and Prospero's Books (two very different movies!) are my favorite Greenaway films.

English and dark humor - something you will get a lot of by watching the movie on hand here. This really will depend on your taste and how you like your movies delivered. The pacing is rather slow but consistent. The movie itself is also quite predictable (just the title right?) and then you have characters that seem not from this world.

But that is also how you should try to engage this. This is different, it does not really dabble in reality and is more like a play or a dream (though I have not checked what this is based on). So depending on your own taste and patience you will like this more or less than what I voted ... I would argue I'm right in the middle. Very well made for sure and really well acted (weirdness considered)

Such an obviously non-American film. I believe this was the first time I had seen Joan Plowright, and she was so good. Having seen more of her work since, I know this is no fluke. Everyone else was also good here, especially Joely Richardson and Bernard Hill. I won't go into any detail, but the movie is weird, weird, weird, and has a dark subject matter without being a dark film. Highly recommended for those looking for something different. Grade: A

One woman in three bodies. Games about death, with death as a rule, and as a consequence. Life as this game and vice versa. The scoring of the game, the ruling of the script according to numbers. Sequential skipping through the numbers as a way of adumbrating the game to tell a story.

Another masterpiece from Greenaway, his most accessible in my view. But that makes it a lesser work compared to his others, because the story is perfectly comprehensible. One can see how his notion of structured visual allegory with narrative footnotes starts to emerge here. The latest I have seen at this writing is The Pillow Book where this is all so much more elaborate and integrated into the narrative. But this film still charms. I wish I could personally thank the financier.

Drowning By Numbers is one of a very small group of perfect films I've seen. Not just 5, 10, 100 point films, but flawless to the point where numerical systems fail to be valuable. Peter Greenaway's third film is about three women a mother, daughter, and niece all named Cissie Colpitts, who one by one drown their husbands in a bath, in the sea, and in a pool. After the first drowning, the local coroner is asked to help cover up the crime, and he agrees believing this will give him car blanche to have his way with the new widow. He is rebuked in the first of several such attempts. His name is Madgett and he orchestrates for the town a series of seemingly random, perhaps ancient (in fact completely made up) games, consisting of strange rules and regulations, like "Hangman's Cricket" where half the game is spent learning the rules. Madgett's son is named Smut(our narrator), and Smut is interested in a young girl dressed in a fancy gown who always claims to be on her way to a party, and who jumps rope counting from 1 to 100 in the films opening sequence. Numbers appear in every scene whether spoken aloud or written on a small or large object in the background. One could make the film itself into a game called "spot the numbers", which count from the first scene to the last from 1 to 100. The film is full of small details some so obscure they are likely to please no one but Peter Greenaway or those willing to watch his behind the scenes blow-by blow "Fear Of Drowning", where for instance, we learn that many lines of dialog consist of the last words of England's kings, sometimes crazed non-sequitters muttered from their death beds. Why include such things, because it makes the game for fun, that's why. As always Greenaway composes every single sequence to achieve a sense of balance, and painterly poise. As usual most scenes, including idle landscape shots are recreations of paintings. Though the images are fantastic, the soundtrack by frequent collaborator Michael Nyman is stunning. I can't think of a director and composer whose works fuse together with such iconoclastic fluid grace since Sergio Leone and Ennio Mariconne. Nyyman's orchestral compositions are energetic, pulsating, lively, and captivating enough to be listened to and enjoyed apart from the film as its own music, and gives a sharp sense of irony and comic timing of its own to Greenaway's visual tableaux. Greenaway is not what you would call a "humanist" director, he rarely shoots close ups, instead remains in wide screen, and letting his characters take up positions as figures in an image, not actors on a stage, or in a film. This can be difficult to deal with if identification with characters is a pre-requisite for enjoyment, because the film aims for visual awe, wafts of aural pleasure, and snatches of witty literate dialog that only doesn't sound like dialog because of the casual delivery the lead actresses are able to give their macabre melodrama. Drowning By Numbers is a multi-layered film meant to be watched several times.

It is a monument to be marveled at, but one where all of the elements of the film medium contribute the structure and design of the piece as whole, where form and content perfectly integrated into each other. The women who drown their husbands, at first do it out of anger, then out of disappointment, and finally out of "solidarity", or in other words for no real reason at all. The pattern of threes needs to be complete, three murders, three autopsies, and three funerals. We know the husbands will die, they are as inexorably fated to their turns in the plot as all people are fated for death, as films are fated to end after a certain number of scenes. We are made hyper-aware of these numbers because they are flashed in a countdown on screen. Does anyone remember the death clock, http://www.deathclock.com/, how it works is after a few personal details are typed in a clock appears counting down to the exact moment you will die. You can watch your life flicker away by measurements. We are all drowning in numbers. Yet it's not all doom and gloom, because the coroner while being an eternal bachelor as fated to be rejected by the widows he assists as their husbands were to watery graves, he is also the master of games. Like his first film the Draughtsman's' Contract the battle of the sexes consumes the characters, where in Draughtsman, an artist who believes he is having his way with a mother and daughter discovers all to late, he is in fact being used and disposed of, so does Madgett find himself helpless in the face of "female solidarity", leaving him to his only recourse of playing more games. Sure death is just around the corner at all times, but there are so many marvelous, silly, frivolous distractions to amuse ourselves with in the meantime; life and all of its contents. "No Country For Old Men" and Blow-Up have both made this same point about death's inevitability and life as a game of chance, but where both those films suffered a self-serious somberness Drowning By Numbers remembers to be a tragic-comedy and not just a tragedy. Life is absurd, of course of course, but the absurd can be very funny, and humor after all is happiness' cheeky cousin, sometimes inappropriate, but nearly always welcome. Smut: "The full flavor of the game Hangman's Cricket is best appreciated after the game has been played for several hours, by then every player has an understanding of the many rules and knows which character they want to play permanently, finally an outright loser is found and is obliged to present himself to the Hangman who is always merciless".

I saw Greenaway's works „The Belly of an Architect`, „Prospero's Books` and above all „The Cook the Thief His Wife and Her Lover` before this one and so I had to be disappointed. Trying to spot the numbers from 1 to 100 is a nice game but, to be honest, I didn't read about the numbers before I saw the film, so, of course, I saw some numbers but I didn't realize that there was a system behind them. Only when I watched the film again, I enjoyed looking for them.

Maybe, Peter Greenaway hoped that everyone would concentrate on the numbers instead of the film. The story is particularly weak, compared to the dense and powerful „Architect` and „Cook-Thief-Wife-Lover`. The women kill there husbands with such a calmness and casualness that even the viewer isn't shocked, although, in reality, it would be an exciting story: in this film, Greenaway's mannerism doesn't work. Still, with the Greenaway movies it's the same as with those of the Coen Brothers: they may not all be perfect, but they are always better than any other film by an „ordinary` director. It seems like Greenaway's ingenious mind took a little break and allowed himself to play a little with the audience. Smut's games, for instance, are very creative; did Greenaway make them up himself?

I give „Drowning by Numbers` 6 points out of 10. For Peter Greenaway that's really quite poor.

Not much I can add to the rave reviews above. A simple-complicated-ugly-beautiful-puzzle-painting of a film, which demands repeated viewings.

"Drowning" is not for everyone - but look at the breakdown on that voting. As I write this, this film got more "10"s than any other number.

I'm not into lists, but if you forced me, this would be my number one.

Go see (or rather go buy). If you've seen it before, see it again - new layers reveal themselves even now.

I'm afraid this one is not for me. I enjoyed both 'The Cook....' and 'Draughtman's', but this one bored the hell out of me. Did not care about any of the characters and found little point to the narrative.

This is a picture that offers so much to the viewer. It is beautiful, but also, at times, grotesque. It is intriguing and complex, and covers a cornucopia of subjects. The film has an elegant Englishness about it. It is a film that always requires your attention and one that you will want to return to.

The film begins with a young girl (adorned in a dress from Velazquez's painting Las Meninas) who is skipping and counting stars, 100 of them (some of these stars have Greenaway names like Hoyten, Luper and Spica). She is the film's navigator.

The story is about three women, all with the same name, Cissie Colpitts, each from different age groups, who have something in common, they each murder their husbands by drowning them. They escape punishment from this by consenting to the needs of an amorous coroner, Madgett. Madgett's young son, Smut, tells us about different games, each of them rather odd. The film has a wonderful surreal feel to it. For instance, a man and a woman on bicycles collide with two dead cows, but it hardly perturbs them. Throughout the film there are the numbers 1 to 100 placed in ascending order on display in some peculiar positions. It's a fascinating riddle.

Only the British could make surrealism seem matter of fact. Arty it could be, but for the imperturbability of its characters, who move like game pieces through the plot . Among all the cogs and set-pieces there is always the sense of private preoccupations that at a whim could be turned off like the telly. No greek tragedy this: beautifully un-acted: the affect is off.

The detachment this creates allows one to sit back and savour the dense painterly textures, perspective as palpable as in Wyndham Lewis' Childermass, the film a canvas, the plot a Slade professor's notes.

Watch it, you get your reward.

I saw the movie at a local art-house cinema, and was instantly converted to the church of Greenaway/Nyman. I raved so much about it that my philestine friends finally agreed to rent it.

Of course, the rented version was pan-n-scanned. It was truly awful. As bad as the original was good. Much of the Greenawaynian charm is his flair for composing scenes visually. Pan-scanning deprives you of almost all the fun. Besides whoever did the pan scanning didn't get the spot-the-numbers game. Several were lost out of frame.

Don't bother renting it on VHS. Maybe the DVD will get it right. Until then, ask the Brattle or your local cinema paradiso to show you it in all its glory.

This completes my viewing of all classic Peter Greenaway films, from his 1982 debut The Draughtman's Contract to 1993's The Baby of Macon (well, I still need to see his 1995 jammer, The Pillow Book, to truly complete this, I suppose). He has become one of my favorite filmmakers in the last 5 years but I would place Drowning By Numbers towards the bottom, just above Prospero's Books (1992), which I might say is one of the most unwatchable movies I have ever seen. While I still enjoyed much of what this film had to offer, the concepts felt, to me, a bit emptier than Greenaway typical fare. Murder is always amusing but I wasn't able to find a deeper inspiration in this story or these characters. Beyond that, there is a lot of effective dark humor and, as usual, tons of beautiful cinematography and set designing - over 2/3 of the shots in this film could be a painting. I recently saw Peter do a lecture in person and stated that he was a painter before he became a filmmaker and perceives every shot like a painting - now I can't watch a Greenaway film without seeing this, but it's a magical thing. Listening to him talk for 90 minutes was just as fascinating as his films are, "We need less writers in film, and more painters".

This is kind of one of those movies where all the characters are unlikeable. Like, really, it's truly hard to like any of them. Because of this, the movie does seem to drag quite a bit considering the story is rather redundant and the vibes remain somewhat bad throughout. This movie is still a rather great feat and accomplishment but it's hard to love it when so many of Greenaway's other films feel so much more thorough and inspired. This one felt most like his 85 film, A Zed & Two Noughts to me, but that one was even MORE bizarre, and I think that was that film's primary charm, aside from it featuring one of the finest musical scores ever made (along with The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, both my Michael Nyman).

I would also say that this is Greenaway's "most British" feeling film! So British! Very strange, like so many of his movies, but I would never recommend anyone start with this one. I would say only watch this if you are a real Greenaway lover.

Tired of her husband's philanderous ways, the mother of two daughters drowns her husband. With the reluctant help of the local coroner, the murder is obscured. Her daughters are having similar problems with relationships, and tend to follow their mother's example.

I really thought I would like this movie, with its clever counting scheme and dark sense of humor. I love black comedy as much or more than I love horror. But for whatever reason, I took no joy at all from this movie.

The How I Met Your Mother episode "Bad News" uses a numbering device inspired by the film, with the numbers counting down to the titular "Bad News," when character Marshall learns that his father has died. Now, that is a show I greatly enjoyed, and now that I know the connection would be interested in seeing the episode again.

This is one of those films that the "artsy" crowd loves - a film that is just too "deep" for the average moviegoer to understand or appreciate. It appeals to the same crowd that calls a jar of urine with a cross in it "art." Cryptic numbers, odd eclectic characters, and fantastic settings substitute for any character development or cohesive story line. Any criticism, however, can be dismissed by the movie's handful of fans with derisive rolling of the eyes. You must just be too thick to get it, and obviously you're far too uneducated for them to even try to explain it to you.

If you have a PhD in philosophy and drink tea from a little china cup with your pinkie finger extended, this film might appeal to you. For the rest of us...well, watch something else. Better yet, stop by the local fast food restaurant and allow one of those pseudo-intellectual fans of this film to serve you a tasty lunch.

In the game of "Guess the Director" the players look at images from Drowning by Numbers and various Wes Anderson movies and try to guess whether the director is Peter Greenaway or Wes Anderson. After three wrong guesses, you are held under water until you drown.

The shtick is exactly the same: lots of colour, maximalist sets full of appealing retro knick-knacks and artefacts, archly symmetrical shots, deadpan comic dialogue, games and other pursuits taken to the point of high eccentric elaboration. Almost every frame here could be from Anderson. In fact I don't like his stuff at all, but it's striking how this film makes the style wonderful by means of a good, engaging, meaningful script that, unlike Anderson, isn't just playing for cheap laughs and archly detached pomo dandyism, and is fully prepared to acknowledge the dark side. Anderson fans should seek it out to see how it's done. It renders at least half of his career irrelevant. And Greenaway invented it all years before Anderson even got started, then simply moved on.

A brilliant work, which, like so much of Greenaway, is about the brutal business of figuring out who's going to fatally take the fall - except this one's really funny.

I actually found this to be one of Peter Greenaway's more accessible films. Though it's still riddled with some surreal imagery that made little, if any, sense to me, it is quite an effective and funny look at the institution of marriage. Now the Colpitts family can't really be accused of having much imagination when it comes to naming their offspring. "Cissie" (Joan Plowright) has "Cissie" (Juliet Stephenson) who has "Cissie (Joely Richardson) and none of these women make matches that they want to endure. There's plenty of philandering going on, so - well use the title as a clue as to just what happens now... This is a strongly characterised drama with three women very much at the top of their game, ably supported by Bernard Hill's rather eccentric "Madgett", that interweaves an intricate serious of - ok, not always the most plausible - sub-plots into a story that's ultimately a revenge comedy. It's a bit on the long side, and it does sag slightly when - I felt, anyway - there is less Plowright on the screen but the dialogue is quickly and pithily delivered, there is loads of rather natural nudity to lend authenticity to the earthiness of the topic and we are left with a powerful assassination of the marriage state and a clear illustration that there are more ways than one to skin a cat (and get away with it!). Michael Nyman has scored this jauntily and together with Sacha Vierny's eclectic style of cinematography, makes this film fun to watch with some deadly undercurrents.

A small-town coroner, who has a young son obsessed with death, helps three women get away with drowning their husbands in this dreadful, pretentious film. While it cannot be denied that director Peter Greenaway has unique vision, the question remains whether his vision is worthy seeing. I appreciate his films in theory, but not in practice. There are a few interesting moments scattered about, but what's the point? What is this film about? And why should we care about the characters and the story? Those are questions Greenaway left me unmotivated to answer.