MOVIE REVIEW : Britain’s Greenaway Plays a ‘Numbers’ Game

“Drowning by Numbers” (Nuart), the latest release from Britain’s always audacious and often-brilliant Peter Greenaway, has us practically drowning in numbers. It begins with a little girl skipping rope and counting a hundred stars in the sky. Then, it glides gracefully into a feminist murder story--actually the fairy tale of Billy-Goat Gruff reversed--which is playfully but rigidly structured by yet another one-to-a-hundred count.

Now, the numbers are everywhere: painted on trees, on cows, on signs, on playing cards, on Polaroid snapshots. They’re in entomological textbooks, on church pews, even on dead bees. They’re secreted in the compositions, casually embedded in the conversations--and they march relentlessly on from the moments just before the film’s first drowning to just before its last.

If “Drowning by Numbers” ever becomes a cult film--and it’s not quite good enough, not as dynamic or provocative as Greenaway’s stunning “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover”--you can imagine fans chanting out the numbers: crowing with delight as they spot a copy of “Catch-22,” or light reflections on a window in a ghostly “83” or a nearly inaudible cricket score, “86,” sputtering from a radio. (A warning: There are lots of tricks--and many numbers in the movie unrelated to the count.)

But, delightfully intricate as Greenaway and production designers Ben Van Os and Jan Roelfs make all this, “Drowning by Numbers” gets undone by its own cleverness.

Superficially, it’s an ironic comedy of crime, set in a lyrically drizzly coastal English village, in which three generations of women, all named Cissie Colpitts (Joan Plowright, Juliet Stevenson and Joely Richardson), drown their husbands while relying on a complaisant, lovelorn coroner, Madgett (the deft Bernard Hill) to cover their tracks. Madgett is the movie’s obsessive game-player: forever devising outlandishly complex variations of cricket or contests based on sheep and tides. His young son, Smut (Jason Edwards), is more obsessive still, a counter/collector extraordinaire.

It’s the conceit of the film that the women, in their camaraderie and conspiracy, are more than a match for anyone. They win because they’re women--and it’s the game plan of this film that women, united together, always win.

That’s the problem.

The suspense is undone by political correctness. No game can remain interesting for long if the outcome seems certain, and quite early on, “Drowning by Numbers” telegraphs the Colpitts trio’s impregnability. Their triumphs--in wit combat, sexual tussles, even in games of handicap catch--become as inevitable as the march of the numbers. Perhaps because it’s difficult to empathize with an automatic winner, especially a smug one--I began to turn against them, and not even Joan Plowright, an extraordinarily sympathetic actress, could win me back. In a way, the film’s feminism turns--unconsciously, of course--a little misogynistic.

Morality handicaps the film; aestheticism elevates it. Certainly, no living filmmaker is more a self-conscious artist, more fixated on art in general, than Peter Greenaway. Witty or dazzling allusions to painting, literature, history and music pack his work, and he and his superb cinematographer, Sacha Vierny, often mix great painters into their visual style. Before, he’s used Vermeer, De la Tour, Canaletto. Here, the model is Pieter Bruegel and the Dutch landscapists; Bruegel’s “Children’s Games” hangs in Madgett’s bedroom as a clue.

There’s a spirit of playful pedantry and many-leveled aestheticism in Greenaway’s work that suggests the Vladimir Nabokov of “Pale Fire.” But there’s a catch (22?). Usually he’s dealing with a theme that echoes the aestheticism: the collision of a persecuted artist (a painter, an architect, a cook) with a crass or treacherous society.

Ironically, in “Drowning by Numbers” (Times-rated Mature for sex, nudity, language and violence), we can’t see the women as artists of anything but murder, exemplars of the very selfishness the film satirizes. With great visual wit and formal ingenuity, Greenaway turns “Drowning” into a grand numbers game. A game, unfortunately, is mostly what remains when the count is done.

‘Drowning by Numbers’

Joan Plowright: Cissie Colpitts 1

Juliet Stevenson: Cissie Colpitts 2

Joely Richardson: Cissie Colpitts 3

Bernard Hill: Madgett

A Film Four International/Elsevier Vendex Film presentation of an Allarts/VPRO Television Holland production, released by Miramax/Prestige Films. Director/screenplay Peter Greenaway. Producers Kees Kasander, Dennis Wigman. Cinematographer Sacha Vierny. Editor John Wilson. Costumes Heather Williams. Music Michael Nyman. Production design Ben Van Os, Jan Roelfs. Running time: 1 hour, 54 minutes.

Times-rated: Mature (sex, nudity, language, violence.)