TV Review
An escape drama based on an actual prison break is liable to incarcerate viewers.
Clinton Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in a bleak tract of upstate New York, has a cold, caged, clanging hopelessness that seeps into the skin of inmates and staff alike. “Out in nature there are no right angles, but in here it’s all right angles,” muses prisoner Richard Matt. “Bars up, bars down, bars across.”
The place is not, so far into Soho’s Escape at Dannemora, any more cruel or violent than you’d expect. In fact, we see chief protagonists David Sweat (Paul Dano) and Matt doing serious time for crimes as yet undisclosed, painting, reading and listening to music. When corrections officer Gene Palmer (David Morse) suddenly headbutts Sweat and smashes his head on a toilet, it’s shocking but really just for form. Palmer mostly colludes with his favourites. In the case of Matt, it is to get the pretty pictures he paints to take home to his wife. Everyone knows the score.
We can’t seem to get enough of real-life crime, and this Showtime seven-parter is based on an actual prison break that does sound scripted for Hollywood. It involved, among its more humdrum elements, sex and sewing. It’s probably best not to read too much about the case beforehand, though spoilers are really beside the point here. The series zeroes in with a sort of cool-eyed wonder on the ways human beings, even those trapped together in a regimented circle of hell frozen over, will find to dream their crazy dreams and pursue their destructive desires.
Matt is played with serene menace by Benicio Del Toro. Dano’s boyish Sweat is deceptively smart. Matt and Sweat: it sounds like a comedy duo. The series is directed, magnificently, by Ben Stiller, so there’s a comic undertow. Sweat is trying to escape Dannemora by reading Call of the Wild. Another inmate keeps trying to engage him in infuriatingly eager, spoiler-ridden conversation about the works of Jack London. Sweat’s choice of reading matter links him to painter Matt’s visions of horses running free through the wilderness. “Say it,” says Matt, as he nudges Sweat to help him with his increasingly urgent escape plans. “’I want to be part of your dream.’”
In the first episode, both work in the prison sewing room under the supervision of Joyce
“Tilly” Mitchell. Patricia Arquette, defiantly dowdy, inhabits a character whose needy, dogged self-involvement is mesmerising and repellent.
She takes quite a shine to Sweat in a disturbingly Oedipal situation and calls him regularly into the storage room to “help” her. He obliges with minimal enthusiasm in scenes with complicated power dynamics. “My husband never looks at me,” explains Tilly.
Sweat is doing life for something clearly bad. Even his own mother seems reluctant to support his application to be moved somewhere warmer and closer to home. When his interludes with Tilly arouse suspicion, he’s sent to a less desirable prison neighbourhood with maddeningly noisy neighbours. Never mind the bars; hell is other people. Sweat’s wasted potential is quietly expressed by the focused efficiency with which he smokes the roaches out of his cupboard.
Meanwhile, Matt has discovered a hidden corridor behind the cells where he clocks a means of escape. Soon he is grooming Tilly with psychopathic skill to transfer her affections to him. Matt’s nickname is “Hacksaw” and she can get him some blades. Clearly they both think they can get away with it. Apparently, incarceration promotes delusion.
The series is slow and claustrophobic but you can’t look away. It’s a prison-break series in the sense that
12 Angry Men is a courtroom drama. The clue that this will be a different sort of experience is in the slightly elliptical title: Escape at Dannemora.
At, not from. There is no escape from Dannemora, for inmate or viewer.
ESCAPE AT DANNEMORA, Sky SoHo, Monday, 8.30pm.
Matt is grooming Tilly with psychopathic skill. His nickname is “Hacksaw” and she can get him some blades.