But the pacing of the show overwhelms these fine details. Shot for shot, the show has moments that are astounding: the finale offers Matt, surrounded by greenery and golden flowers, balancing a shotgun before drifting through a clearing, with a tarp billowing behind him like a cape. Escape at Dannemora is far too long the seven-part miniseries includes a few installments that stretch past an hour, including a 100-minute long finale. Stiller has so much to work with that he can convey to the viewer the warren-like maze under Dannemora that the inmates used to escape-as well as the quiet solitude of verdant mountains they fled to.īut the wealth of resources has a downside.
Escape from dannemora real story series#
(Though Escape at Dannemora is not comedic, Stiller's sensibilities peek through the seriousness: The whole series is scored with 2015-era Top 40 hits, because they're Tilly's preferred soundtrack at work.) The production had access to and filmed on location in Dannemora, New York, where the prison is located some set pieces include the real-life hideouts and escape routes used by Sweat and Matt. (He directed 1994's Reality Bites, 2008's Tropic Thunder, and 2013's The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, among others.) Stiller, aided by cinematographer Jessica Lee Gagné, imbues the proceedings with raw, charged energy. These three performances alone would make Escape at Dannemora worth exploring, but there’s additional appeal: director Ben Stiller, who in a departure from a decades-long comedy career onscreen takes another turn behind the camera. And she escapes so thoroughly into her erotic fantasies that they blot out any perspective on what she’s getting herself into. She switches gears from dowdy government employee to begging-for-it wanton so quickly, so seamlessly, that it’s de-stabilizing. Her sexual encounters with David Sweat (Dano)-who in the show’s framing is her first and more serious partner-are perfunctory, seconds-long encounters where Tilly doesn’t even take off her cardigan. Arquette traps a delusional, sexual yearning in the body of a voluptuously trashy middle-aged woman-juxtaposing bad teeth and wire-rimmed glasses with desperate, clandestine fucking.
The entirety of the cast is at the top of their game-including leads Benicio Del Toro and Paul Dano, who play the two inmates, and supporting players David Morse, Bonnie Hunt, Eric Lange, and even Michael Imperioli as Governor Andrew Cuomo.īut it’s Arquette’s Tilly that steals the show. Arquette plays Joyce “Tilly” Mitchell, a prison employee who became enamored of two inmates and ends up abetting their unbelievable jailbreak. I wonder what that voter would say watching Arquette in Showtime’s expansive Escape at Dannemora, based on a daring real-life incident at Clinton Correctional Facility in June 2015. “If she had had work done during the 12 years, she would not be collecting these statues. “She gets points for working on a film for 12 years and bonus points for having no work done during the 12 years,” the voter said. In 2015, during the Oscar campaign for Boyhood, an anonymous female Academy member told The Hollywood Reporter that she was voting for Patricia Arquette-who would, in fact, go on to win best-supporting actress-because Arquette didn’t get any cosmetic procedures done while she was making the film she shot gradually over the course of more than a decade.
0 kommentar(er)
