Patricia Arquette plays Joyce (Tilly) Mitchell, who worked at a penitentiary in upstate New York, became sexually involved with two prisoners, David Sweat (Paul Dano) and Richard Matt (Benicio Del Toro), and eventually aided their escape.Christopher Saunders
It remains startling how much excellent, serious-minded TV content exists now.
In the space of a few days, a long list of series, long or short-form, arrives. On Friday, The Kominsky Method and Narcos: Mexico (both already reviewed) arrive on Netflix. On Sunday, HBO unveils My Brilliant Friend (review coming Saturday), its adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s acclaimed bestselling novel. Also on Sunday comes Showtime’s star-studded Escape at Dannemora (see below). On Monday, AMC delivers its already-acclaimed-in-Britain adaptation of John le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl. A review of that will appear in Monday’s paper and online earlier.
In this time of rarefied TV, across all these productions, we are invited to ponder life, love, crime, betrayal, deceit and deprivation. We are sometimes invited to laugh and sometimes to shrink from the unsettling meaning. We are asked to wonder why people do extraordinary things for a lost cause. And throughout, deeply committed performances command our attention.
Escape at Dannemora (Sunday, CraveTV, CRM1, 10 p.m.) is dominated by one truly commanding and sometimes unsettling performance. Patricia Arquette plays the real Joyce (Tilly) Mitchell, who worked at a penitentiary in upstate New York, became sexually involved with two prisoners, David Sweat (Paul Dano) and Richard Matt (Benicio Del Toro), and eventually aided their escape.
Escape at Dannemora is a seven-hour drama series requiring a journey into the physical and emotional bearings of a ferociously abstruse woman.Wilson Webb
This is the sort of role that rarely comes along and even more rarely attracts an actor of Arquette’s fame and recognition. Tilly is dowdy, bitter and all middle-aged spread. She wears cheap, ill-fitting clothes and glasses so unfashionable, with hair so unkempt, you would think she cares nothing about her appearance. But she is rapacious in her need for sex and devotion. She is one complicated soul and at her core that soul is very dark.
This is not one of those acting turns that a glamorous actor will do for a movie in hopes of awards and praise for abandoning conventional attractiveness. Escape at Dannemora is a seven-hour drama series requiring a journey into the physical and emotional bearings of a ferociously abstruse woman.
What unfolds is, more or less, what happened. In 2015, a prison break at a maximum-security facility in the isolated town of Dannemora drew international attention because two men convicted of murder had escaped. And later, it was revealed that Tilly Joyce had helped them after multiple sexual liaisons with both.
When we first meet Tilly, she’s being interviewed, postescape, by the Inspector-General for the State of New York (Bonnie Hunt). Tilly asks if the job title means the interviewer is from the post office. She’s asked if she was involved in the prison break. “I didn’t do anything wrong, I mean not really wrong,” she answers. Asked if she has sex with the two inmates, Tilly answers, “No.”
Paul Dano as David Sweat, left, and Benicio Del Toro as Richard Matt in Escape at Dannemora.Christopher Saunders
Then, as the soundtrack plays Girl From the North Country sung by Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash, the story of Tilly’s recent life begins to unfold. She’s the civilian supervisor of the prison’s small garment factory and popular because she treats the inmates with some respect and wit. Pretty soon, it becomes clear she’s having an intense sexual affair with David Sweat, a young prisoner with all sorts of issues, one of them being his mother. When she isn’t working, Tilly spends her time sniping at her easy-going husband, Lyle (Eric Lange).
In the style of prison-genre dramas, we slowly get a deeper picture of the institution. Guard Gene (David Morse) does favours for Richard Matt because Matt is a talented artist who can do impressive paintings for a small fee. There is little violence; only the oppressive sense of inmates and guards trapped in a small town as desolate as the prison.
A lot of attention is paid to that small town, to its bleakness and backcountry workaday routines. It’s a boring, cold place for most of the year. (Although steeped in comedy, Ben Stiller, who directs every episode, does an impressive job defining the town.) A highlight of Lyle’s weekend is going to a War of 1812 museum in Plattsburgh where he and Tilly are the only visitors. People tell Lyle that there’s a rumour about Tilly and a prisoner, but he shrugs it off as though it were simply an outlandish idea.
By accident, during a routine search of the prison, Watt gets a glimpse of internal tunnels and begins to plot a possible escape. He needs help and that means roping in both Sweat and Tilly. As in most prison-escape dramas there are long stretches of frustration for the wannabe escapees. In truth, at seven hours long, the series is too extended. It could have been trimmed by two hours. But there is a remarkable twist in Episode 6 when, the escape achieved, the central characters become starkly revealed, all their poisons and weaknesses exposed.
And throughout sits the figure of Tilly, simultaneously terrifying and pathetic, toxically real and unforgettable.