“Escape at Dannemora” (Showtime) recounts the 2015 prison break at the Clinton Correctional Facility, which ended, after a three-week manhunt, with one escapee dead and the other captured. The prison, located in northernmost New York, is nicknamed Little Siberia, and the opening episodes of the seven-part miniseries, set in the deep winter, convey a dismal frigidity. The cold seems to have bleached the color from the small-town landscape, so that it looks as despondent as the institutional greens of the prison interiors. In a sense, the corrections officers and civilian employees—everyone in town except for the vacation-home owners—are as constrained as the jailbirds. Joyce (Tilly) Mitchell, a tailor-shop supervisor, is the most stir-crazy among them. She hurls herself into sexual flings with two inmates and supplies the contraband necessary for their breakout.
Patricia Arquette’s excellence as Tilly is the strongest selling point of a show where the points of an unsurprising plotline are subordinate to a memorable intensity of performances. She slumps through life with a dim husband who subsists on good intentions and thin beer. Her face collapses in anger and crumples with disappointment; her speech is a long, nasal whine. Her appearance is frowsy, but the cut of her tops advertises erotic vitality, and the delusion in her eyes announces her ripeness as a mark. Susceptible to the most meagre flattery, she is undefended against her own fantasies.
When “Dannemora”—created by Brett Johnson and Michael Tolkin, and directed by Ben Stiller—begins, Tilly is carrying on with David Sweat (Paul Dano). One character calls Sweat a “weasel,” but the energy Dano brings to the role is clearly canine, all puppyish moping and stray-dog desolation. When the advance work for the escape gets under way—in drudging procedural scenes periodically punched with moments of claustrophobic anxiety and tiptoe suspense—Sweat swings a sledgehammer at a brick wall with a panting, animal tenacity.
Rumors of the affair reach Tilly’s superiors, who reassign Sweat from the tailor shop to the library, at which point Richard Matt (Benicio del Toro), his next-door neighbor on the cell block, begins to prey upon Tilly with the well-oiled patience of an expert manipulator; his aim is to persuade her to smuggle in a hacksaw. Tilly’s desperation comes to the fore. The series is frequently right at edge of mocking Tilly and her husband (a fellow prison employee played, superbly, by Eric Lange) for their schlumpiness; to costume her in a powder-pink sweatshirt festooned with tumbling Teddy bears and the legend “Bearing It in Utica” is to approach cruelty. But “Dannemora” pulls away from cheap mockery to achieve rich and sympathetic observation of a woman who, in signing on as the escapees’ getaway driver, succumbs to a pipe dream of flight.
As Matt, del Toro swims his eyes around beneath wizardly lids. He’s a big man on the cell block, strutting through the commissary line with kingpin cool. Despite his manipulations of Tilly and everyone else, he is likable until late in the series, when his suavity collapses and revelations begin to unfold via flashback, rearranging the audience’s sympathies in time for the hundred-minute finale. That last episode, depicting the manhunt, will seem excessively long to all viewers except for those trained by Steven Soderbergh’s “Che” to admire extended sequences of del Toro creeping through foliage. But the duration affords generous space for Arquette to embody the misery of a person who must finally confront her inability to escape from herself.
Sourse: newyorker.com
