Showtime’s ‘Escape at Dannemora’ smart, nuanced
Miniseries chronicles murderers’ quest for life outside the prison walls
Almost as soon as the story broke, we all knew a movie or TV adaptation couldn’t be far behind. The tale of convicted murderers Richard Matt, David Sweat and their flight from the Clinton Correctional Facility in June 2015 was too juicy not to adapt.
The woman inside who helped them. The 23-day manhunt and shootout that followed. The oddly colorful details that emerged. Even their names seem ripped from the cheeseball imagination of some Hollywood screenwriter (Matt and Sweat? Seriously?).
But there’s nothing cheeseball about “Escape at Dannemora,” a seven-part series that premieres on Showtime at 10 p.m. Sunday. No overheated clichés or broad-brush caricatures of prison life clog its opening hours. Judging from the first two episodes — set in January and February 2015 — the show takes its time, meticulously laying out both the logistics behind the break and the complex personalities at play.
Director Ben Stiller (yes, that Ben Stiller) and writers/executive producers Brett Johnson and Michael Tolkin zero in on the tale’s psychological shadings with a deftness that makes for absorbing television. In an early scene, Matt — a skilled artist — instructs Sweat on the necessity of balancing light with shadows, a lesson that the “Dannemora” creators appear to have taken to heart.
The result is fascinating, nuanced and smart, a tricky weave of character studies that benefit from the three actors in the leads: Benicio Del Toro as Matt, Paul Dano as Sweat and Patricia Arquette as Joyce “Tilly” Mitchell, the prison employee who oversees them in the tailoring shop. When we meet them all in chapter one, Mitchell is busy with Sweat, periodically calling him back to a side room for carnal sessions of blazing speed and efficiency. By the second chapter she’s started in on Matt, who’s also started in on her, cultivating her for tools and other assistance in his gradually emerging plan to bust out of prison.
All three are terrific: Dano, with his mounting frustration and un-
expected air of sincerity; Del Toro, with his impenetrable gaze, tough-guy authority and low purr of danger (“I’ll rip his lungs out and drink his blood,” he jokes, or maybe not); Arquette, with her flat-voweled North Country accent and her mesmerizingly crazy mood swings, which tack from childlike bafflement to wackadoodle horniness to wounded pique. Outfitted with crooked teeth and an extra 40 pounds, she’s all but unrecognizable and outrageously good.
Stiller shot “Escape at Dannemora” at and around the facility late last year, capturing the area’s rural beauties and some of its more obvious quirks. Anyone from anywhere remotely nearby will enjoy spotting familiar villages and vistas, and anyone who has suffered through a winter up there will nod in sympathy as Sweat, shouting into a prison phone, complains to his mother that he needs to be transferred downstate because it’s just too cold.
And in a story arc that’s gunning toward violence, what’s most remarkable is the lightness of the touch. Those first two episodes are dotted with humor, playing off, say, Tilly’s fondness for pop songs (“It’s not crap! It’s Nick Jonas, and I like it!”) or Sweat’s choice of novels: We see him reading “Call of the Wild,” Jack London’s story of a dog in the wintry backwoods who’s tempted to go feral. “F---ed up, what happens in that book,” observes another inmate, who then proceeds to spoil it. Yes, the moment is obvious in its foreshadowing, but it’s also looselimbed, unforced and funny.
That loose-limbedness plays out as the opening hours progress and Matt works his wily machinations on a guard (David Morse), on Tilly, and on Sweat — who resists the crackpot notion of a prison break until he doesn’t. “You wanna be part of my dream?” Matt finally asks Sweat near the end of episode two. The answer comes back: “Fine. I wanna be a part of your dream.”
Over the sounds of a sly blues riff, they shake hands. The game is on.