Del Toro’s smoldering charisma is thwarted here by a narrative trick that doesn’t show who his character really is until a flashback that comes late in the series. In the fifth episode, Tilly makes a profound moral choice while wearing a pink sweater covered in cartoon animals that says “Bearin’ It in Utica.”īut it’s not quite enough to keep audiences more than mildly interested. I laughed out loud during one scene in which Benicio del Toro struts through the prison yard with sunglasses on like a portly, incarcerated Blues Brother. It’s there in the musical cues, which take loaded dramatic moments and punctuate them with Meghan Trainor or Ed Sheeran (Tilly Mitchell, in reality, kept the radio in her prison workshop tuned to a Top 40 pop station).
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And yet Dannemora has a strain of humor within it, if you look closely.
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Some early reviews seemed surprised that Stiller, best known as a comic actor, would create a series that’s so insistently dour, steeped in the grayness of prison and the synthetic neon emptiness of the community outside. Stiller seems happy just to contemplate them, but the payoff for viewers is minimal. A different director might employ an element of surprise here, leaving viewers guessing what the sonic interludes might be. The show spends significant time considering sounds: the repetitive bang of a chisel, the catch of a hacksaw, the jagged whir of a blender. Dannemora, by contrast, takes a glacial approach to storytelling, as if its characters need thawing out before they can get to work. And even if you’re intimately acquainted with the dynamics of the Suez Crisis, Season 2 of The Crown gives a punchy kind of urgency to Prime Minister Anthony Eden’s calamitous meltdown. Hulu’s The Looming Tower doesn’t reveal anything about the lead-up to 9/11 that hasn’t already been analyzed in detail, but the inevitability of its final tragedy makes the stakes of the FBI boss John O’Neill’s counterterrorism efforts even higher. When so much of a television show’s plot is based on well-documented real-life events, the key to keeping things suspenseful is tension. Read: The long odds against New York’s fugitive prisoners
Mitchell was supposed to help drive them to West Virginia in the aftermath of their escape, but she changed her mind, leaving the prisoners to try to escape on foot. The intrigue of the Clinton escape was amped up by its salacious sexual component-Matt and Sweat were aided in their escape by Mitchell, with whom at least one of them had been having an affair. In 2015, two prisoners at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York, excavated their way outside using a series of illicitly obtained tools and an unfortunately large pipe. That’s possibly because everyone already knows how the story unfolds, and how it ends. Dannemora, written by Brett Johnson and Michael Tolkin, unspools its events so cautiously that the most dramatic moments in the first hour-long episode include a Nick Jonas song, a tiny pair of pants, and TV’s heartfelt answer to the Bad Sex Awards. But then, not that much is happening in the plot, either.
Only Patricia Arquette’s Joyce “Tilly” Mitchell, a mewling, self-pitying, intensely manipulative supervisor in what amounts to the prison sweatshop, feels like a fully fledged person, if a tragic and repellent one.
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What, though, to make of the six hours that precede it? Are they necessary? Is this a TV series or an almost eight-hour movie? If television is a medium for characters while movies serve plot, Escape at Dannemora, based on an infamous real-life prison break, seems to plunk itself definitively in the “movie” category, keeping its two central convicts, del Toro’s Matt and Paul Dano’s David Sweat, at arm’s length. It ends with a scene that’s cryptically ambiguous, and then with a montage featuring an oil painting of a puppy in a T-shirt that reads “Wazzup?”
It’s darkly funny (“I knew you were having an affair on me,” one character bleats, “when you started ordering off the diet menu at King’s Wok”). It’s grim (particularly after Benicio del Toro’s character, Richard Matt, disregards advice not to drink from a pool of standing water). Ben Stiller, its director (yes, that Ben Stiller), crafts a tight, poetically beautiful narrative of escape in the misty blue mountains of the North Country-the kind of tense, thoughtful, slightly surreal drama that contrasts America’s most stunning landscapes with its bleak scenes of rural despair. The final episode of Showtime’s Escape at Dannemora, which runs an astonishing one hour and 38 minutes long, is actually a pretty dazzling movie.
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