Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Escape At Dannemora’ On Netflix, Ben Stiller’s Epic About A Salacious Real-Life Prison Escape Story

Almost a decade ago, there was a notorious prison escape at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York. What was unusual about it was that the escape was facilitated by a seemingly unassuming woman who worked at the prison, who also just happened to be carrying on an affair with both escapees. The Ben Stiller-directed Escape At Dannemora , which premiered on Showtime back in 2018 but just landed on Netflix, is a barely-fictional account of that case. Will such a fresh case play well as a miniseries?

Praise Kier! ‘Severance’s Season 2 Teaser Trailer Is Here And We’ve Never Been Happier To Return To Office

Opening Shot: An eagle flies through a cloudless blue sky as ELP’s “From The Beginning” starts to play. Then we see a highway that cuts through fields and an SUV riding through.

The Gist: The SUV contains New York’s inspector general, Catherine Scott (Bonnie Hunt), who is going to the small town of Dannemora to investigate an escape at the Clinton Correction Facility, a maximum security prison. It’s June of 2015. There, she questions one of the people arrested in the escape, a glasses-clad middle-aged woman named Joyce “Tillie” Mitchell (Patricia Arquette). She is accused of assisting the escape of the two prisoners, and Catherine wants to see what she’s willing to admit to. The first thing Tillie says is, “Am I going to lose my job?”

‘Severance’ Season 2 Gets An Official Premiere Date On Apple TV+ (And Another Eerie Teaser)

We flash back to January. Tillie is a prison tailor, supervising a massive shop where inmates sew uniforms and special requests from the superintendent. Her husband Lyle (Eric Lange) works there, too, and they make the long cold commute there every day, speaking the patter longtime married couples always speak, about boring everyday things.

At work, she calls one of the inmates, David Sweat (Paul Dano) into a side room to get some machine oil or some other bogus reason; she pulls down her pants and he takes her from behind. They think that they’re being discreet, but the rumors about them have been rifling through the cell block, even getting back to Lyle. Sweat likes the special treatment, but Tillie is pressuring him to make it a real relationship, leading Sweat to ask for a transfer out of Clinton.

Watching all of this is Richard Matt (Benicio Del Toro), a lifer whose force of personality and tendency to threaten has gotten him to a position where he more or less rules the roost at Clinton. New inmates need to ask his permission to do things, and he gets angry with one when the new guy interrupts his conversation with one of the top COs, Gene Palmer (David Morse). Palmer seems to be in Matt’s pocket, letting him paint in his cell (even asking Matt to paint a portrait of his girlfriend), giving Matt a head’s up when the guards are going to search for contraband, even letting him in a utility tunnel that leads from his office. Palmer tries to be chummy with Matt, talking about how “everyone has personality.” Matt replies menacingly, “Look into my eyes and tell me you believe that.”

CLICK HERE TO GET EMAILS FROM DECIDER

Matt makes his move on Tillie, telling her “a friend of Sweat’s is a friend of mine,” and she’s both annoyed and flattered. Then, after his cell gets tossed, Matt notices a vent grating he never saw before, which starts to generate an idea.

Our Take: Escape At Dannemora is based on a notorious prison break case from 2015; the real Tillie was in the news as recently as 2017 when her appeal to reduce her prison term was rejected. It was a pretty sensational story at the time it broke; a middle-aged tailor lets two dangerous men, both of whom she was having sexual relations with, escape a max-security prison. Normally this would be the topic of a quickly-done Lifetime movie. But in Ben Stiller’s very capable hands, the story from Brett Johnson ( Mad Men ) and Michael Tolkin ( Deep Impact ) the story becomes more layered and epic.

We’ve seen Del Toro play brooding and menacing before; he’s fantastic as Matt, but the way he plays it isn’t much different than what we’ve seen. Paul Dano is so good that you hardly realize that it’s Paul Dano playing Sweat. But Arquette is the real star of Dannemora , even if Del Toro is first in the credits. There are times she plays Tillie as the dumpy, whiny, not-that-bright person she seems to be at first. But in other scenes, she projects a sweaty sexuality that belies her humdrum life with Lyle. In still others, her manner with Lyle and others is cutting to the point of ruthless.

What we know about Tillie is that there is an aspect of her life that’s not only deeply troubled, but makes her deeply restless. And in the first episode, Arquette shows all of that, even if we don’t know for sure why she is the way she is.

Stiller does a fantastic job of pacing the first episode; while others may think he’s stretching the story, he’s trying to create a vibe where we contrast the small-town, almost Fargo- esque life of Tillie and Lyle with Tillie’s voraciousness inside Clinton’s walls. He also does a great job of integrating classic rock with current pop to indicate that this story isn’t from 30 years ago, it happened just over 9 years back and is still very fresh.

Sex and Skin: At least three scenes where Tillie and Sweat have clumsy sex, one where she demands he look her in the face. No nudity other than butts, though.

Parting Shot: After lights out, Matt asks Sweat if the COs moved his bed during their inspection. Sweat says “I don’t think so… why?” Matt: “Nothing.”

Sleeper Star: At first we thought Eric Lange was playing Lyle as too much of a moron. But when Lyle asked Tillie why she’s talking to Sweat so much, we realized he’s smarter than his boring dialogue about the 1812 War Museum makes him look. Oh, and we’ll pretty much watch Bonnie Hunt do anything, and she’s great here as she tries to squeeze info out of Tillie by pretending to be on her side.

Most Pilot-y Line: “It’s not crap! It’s Nick Jonas and I like it!” That line from Tillie gave us chills, and not good ones.

Our Call: STREAM IT. A fine directorial job by Stiller and an Emmy-nominated performance by Arquette make Escape At Dannemora a must-watch.

Joel Keller ( @joelkeller ) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

For more entertainment news and streaming recommendations, visit decider.com