Drowning By Numbers
At a glance...
- Directed by Peter Greenaway
- Released in 1988
- Runtime 118 minutes
- Watched at home
- Final feelings: inscrutable for the first half but I warmed up to it at the end.
As much as I love Peter Greenaway, I will admit I spent more time than I expected in this just being baffled at the comedy and the editing, and I said to myself, out loud, on multiple occasions, "good god, english people are fucking space aliens". What a weird feeling when the same construction and detail that goes into these dramas that I love is made humorous? The characters feel just as over-the-top as in other films, but my dumb American brain needs to hear a laugh track to cue me in. Also, I didn't realize the numbers were counting up to mirror the very long counting scene at the start until we were in the 20s. That's embarrassing.
Honestly this feels very similar in tone to The Draughtman's Contract, but I admit that Smut (the character, there is a child in this movie named Smut who is amazing) really steals the show here for me. He's the diegetic force behind most of the numbering in the film, and we understand that it is tracking grisly death and yet we can't be bothered to really examine closely each enumeration in any given shot. For something so comedic and which feels quite slow, at times, the numbers give a sense of urgency and dread that it will all lead to something quite unfortunate.
Honestly this is probably something that a better film-viewer will see as genius. There's so much information packed in each shot and everything feels interwoven in a really satisfying way, all while these British folks have the driest and most serious conversations about the virtues of drowning husbands and covering up their murders. Will definitely have to revisit again when I'll not be blindsided by all these children saying out-of-pocket things and seeing my liege King Theoden being the most doormat lawn game aficionado in film history. When someone I was watching with pointed out that the game rules were all obscenely complicated until the final game, which was an actual real, simple game of tug-of-war, which pairs up with Madgett's final resolution to actually take a stand against the women who had been using him, I realized there was probably so much to this I was just completely missing. I don't know how to defend myself, it's not like I hate British comedy! I just think maybe my brain was absolutely cooked when the movie opens with a little girl in a princess dress counting to 100 and naming the stars while jumping rope. Really surprised that I am continuing to feel like The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover is Greenaway's most accessible film?!