Escape at Dannemora, review: a slow burn prison-break drama boosted by its excellent cast
In 2015, two inmates absconded from the maximum security Clinton Correctional Facility in upstate New York, helped by a middle-aged female prison employee who appeared to be in some sort of relationship with both of them (and was crassly nicknamed "Shawskank" by the American tabloids). Escape at Dannemora (Sky Atlantic) is the utterly inevitable TV miniseries recreating that break out, muscling its way into the already overstuffed prison genre.
Created and written by Brett Johnson and Michael Tolkin (Ray Donovan) and directed by Ben Stiller, making his first diversion from comedy directing, the story begins, like most heavyweight dramas these days, towards the end. Patricia Arquette sits opposite Bonnie Hunt, the latter the New York State Inspector General investigating the incident, the former the seemingly infantile 51-year-old prison worker Joyce “Tilly” Mitchell, who is asked frankly whether she had sex with the two convicted murderers, David Sweat (Paul Dano) and Richard Matt (Benicio Del Toro).
The two inmates are cell neighbours and spend their days toiling in the prison tailor shop under the guidance of workshop supervisor Tilly, who whiles away the boredom of both her job and her humdrum marriage by indiscreetly engaging in lewd trysts in the storeroom with the much-younger Sweat. When the two men decide to escape, Matt targets Tilly’s apparent susceptibility to flattery as a way of getting hold of the tools to break through their cell walls.
All the best prison escape film or TV series, from The Shawshank Redemption to Escape from Alcatraz, show us in painstaking detail the elaborate, time-intensive work needed to break out of a heavily-guarded institution. As the Clinton inmates meticulously grind through stone, metal and plaster, we can almost hear Morgan Freeman's Red tittering "I remember thinking it would take a man 600 years to tunnel through the wall... old Andy did it in less than 20". Told across seven episodes, the time period here is only a few months. Yet this is no crash, bang thriller, and often meanders along at its own leisure, or drums up tension in that minute attention to detail.
Largely filmed in Dannemora and Clinton itself, looking every inch the freezing cold, depressingly unmodern prison, it’s winningly shot, through cell bars and stooped under low roofs, each scene emanating the claustrophobic nature of a lot of dangerous men rubbing alongside each other, and occasionally sparking.
Del Toro can wear a gruff frown with the best of the crumpled Hollywood antiheroes. Here, he’s a bad man with a reasonable talent for painting that’s revered by some members of the prison staff – not least guard Gene Palmer (David Morse) who exchanges favours for paintings. Matt is established early on as an alpha dog who maintains his status by being the guy who can smuggle in contraband for his fellow inmates. But he doesn’t spend all his days pushing his weight around to prove himself within the prison walls (to the relief of us viewers who have seen that all before). In fact, even though the escape itself is hardly rushed into, little time is given over to gangs, hierarchy or the usual intra-inmate animosity that comes with the genre. Instead we learn more about the inmate-officer dynamic (and the inevitable corruption) and the unusual, restrained friendship between two lifers with a 14-year age gap between them and little in the way of converging personalities.
What does bind them is their own horrific crimes, lack of remorse and a sense of entitlement that they deserve a fresh, free start. Both are also fairly smart, determined and charismatic, willing to whittle away at the air vents in their cells for months on end with hacksaw blades smuggled in by the prison worker accomplices they charm and befriend.
In some ways it’s clever that we know so little about their pasts for so long – Palmer refers enigmatically to the "f---ed up s---" that Matt did in order to be landed in prison, while purchasing a custom-made portrait of his wife for her birthday; the comparatively more sincere inmate Sweat mentions being called a “cop killer” by the correctional officers early on – otherwise, it might seem hard to care about these two men and their hard-won goal. But it does also feel like the writers are holding out on us, dangling the truth out of view for as long as they can get away with.
To their credit, the producers went to great lengths to give us a story as close to the truth as possible – this isn’t, we’re told, a drama that takes its artistic licence and runs with it. By and large, what we’re seeing on screen is what happened… at least, to a point: the real Tilly Mitchell has publicly called Stiller a liar, and has always claimed that her relationship with Sweat and Matt was not sexual, and that she only helped them because she was afraid of them. (Stiller has said that he stands by their research.)
But the true star turn among the cast is indeed from Arquette as Tilly, who brings heart and nuance to the classic trope of a downtrodden, undersexed, middle-aged woman. Though led by these two men, who tell her what she wants – or needs – to hear, this Tilly is not exactly without agency. She’s chasing thrills as keenly and knowingly as they’re chasing freedom.
It's a slow trod to get to a climax that was well-documented at the time, pierced with very occasional moments of violence and more frequent bursts of songs from the eclectic soundtrack that serve to kick up the rhythm. It takes a long while before Sweat and Matt make it out of the prison. But the pace isn’t an inherently bad thing – and it will only be subjective whether the story drags too much over the seven episodes. Yes, there is flab that could be trimmed; but I wasn’t bored either. Yet it is hard to shake the feeling that, once we know all that we do, these are not characters that deserve to be rooted for.
Escape at Dannemora continues on Sky Atlantic and is available as a box set on Now TV