Escape at Dannemora: Patricia Arquette’s tour de force breaks the bounds of prison drama ... and then there are the wigs

Captive heart: Patricia Arquette won a Golden Globe for her portrayal of jail supervisor Tilly
Showtime
Alastair McKay22 January 2019

In the interviews she has given about her Golden-Globe-winning role in this prison escape drama, Patricia Arquette frequently says something that seems obvious but is actually quite radical.

It is not to do with the fact that she had to deglamorise herself to play Joyce “Tilly” Mitchell, the civilian supervisor who helped inmates Richard Matt and David Sweat escape from prison in upstate New York in 2015 - though there is no escaping the way she looks.

As Tilly, Arquette is fatter - she added 40lb to play the role. Her eyes are accessorised with giant contact lenses, the effect of which is uncertain: Tilly is a tentative, fearful character but she is also taking terrible risks. However, what you see when you look through her glasses and into her contacts is a kind of fierce blankness.

Then there’s the teeth. The teeth are messed up. They are so terrible that they become part of the plot. But she also has an underbite, which adds a note of vulnerability to her face. And to crown it all, there are the wigs. Terrible wigs. Even in this week’s episode, where Tilly has started to dream of a better life and is making herself over, trying on bathing costumes and getting her hair done, she looks a fright.

Showtime

But that’s just the disguise. The interesting thing Arquette says is that, particularly with female characters, there is an expectation that they will be empathetic and likeable in some way. “And,” Arquette has said, “I just don’t care about that.”

To be fair, Arquette isn’t the only one. Empathy is rationed by everyone concerned. Ben Stiller directs the thing as if his natural urge — towards comedy — has been outlawed. As Sweat, Paul Dano has the aura of a lizard swimming in a pot of slow-boiling vinegar. And Benicio Del Toro, as Matt, has gone to extraordinary lengths to dampen down his natural charisma. The furrows on his brow have furrows.

True, Matt has to manipulate Tilly with his animal charm, quoting Oprah’s motivational mantras to urge her on, but mostly Del Toro looks tired and beaten-down in a prison environment where the light is blue and the sweat runs cold.

It is a punishing watch. Confinement is everything, though Stiller occasionally entertains himself with jarring mo-ments. The chiselling underground, as the tunnel is dug, has a sexual rhythm. The sex between Matt and Tilly looks like a slow dance on an electric chair.

But this week (in episode four) we see more of life outside the prison, and the desperate attempts of Tilly’s idiot husband Lyle (Eric Lange) to celebrate the couple’s 21st wedding anniversary. Little does he know that Tilly has just been given a shopping list that includes a rope, a hatchet, a shotgun and a shovel. Why should we care? Perversely, because the drama makes it so hard to. Escape at Dannemora ignores the usual shorthand of the incarceration drama by making the escape seem futile and doomed even before it has happened. In fact, it’s not really about the prisoners at all.

The captive in this story is Tilly, the civilian stuck in a dead relationship who is coaxed into dreaming about a different life and follows that urge — even though, for her, hope is a bruise.

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