Both actors, along with David Morse (as an ethically challenged and conflicted prison guard), are stellar. Though Del Toro’s Matt, something of a prison kingpin for the favors he can wrangle and the proficient oil paintings he produces, is a familiar character for those who know their prison dramas, Dano’s Sweat is more nuanced and ultimately more intriguing. By the sixth episode “reveal” of each character’s heart of darkness, it is Tilly’s the audience will end up being least surprised by since they’ve already seen it incessantly in action.ĭano and Del Toro - but Dano, especially - have more to work with in their characters. Though Lange’s all-in performance gives Lyle a sympathetic layer, especially since we know his dopey demeanor is being taken advantage of, Arquette’s Tilly at some point becomes so relentlessly annoying and unlikable that there’s no emotional connection to her bad deeds. Why is this ultimately a big deal? Because as long stretches of Escape at Dannemora begin to feel like they are dragging, it becomes a distinct distraction. Each character is dominated - and enough emphasis can’t be put on this - by seriously bad dental issues and minor speech impediments, further enhanced by the characters’ rural speech patterns. The level of detail the series gets into with Tilly and her husband, Lyle (Eric Lange), allows both actors to deliver exceptionally committed performances, heavy on the disdain Tilly felt for Lyle and Lyle’s own open-hearted but dimwitted ways. Tilly is pretty awful - deeply twisted in a back-country, uneducated kind of way. Escape at Dannemora takes great pains to conceal that inherent flaw by not revealing the full darkness at the heart of the main characters until the penultimate episode, but by then the overwhelming slowness has become a major deterrent - even when patches in most episodes have their riveting moments. Which is the other big problem - most people are in prison for a reason, in this case murder, and no matter how much a granular look at their lives in the present creates empathy and frames a new perspective on their characters, these people are ultimately not angels. Prison break stories, no matter how weird - and there’s some deep oddness to the story here - are often easily bogged down by the seemingly eternal effort to get out, a major problem exacerbated here by the surprising amount of excess fat created by deep-diving into the lives of the major characters over seven-plus hours. The series has a stellar cast - Benicio Del Toro, Patricia Arquette and Paul Dano, just for starters - with Ben Stiller directing and joining the effort at tackling the subject matter head-on.īut the subject matter is one of the main things that trips up Escape at Dannemora and there’s not much that Stiller or a fine cast can do about it. There’s no denying the very clear and sometimes effective thoroughness and seriousness of the new Showtime limited series Escape at Dannemora, about the famous real-life prison break there in 2015.
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