Here, finally, for better and (inevitably) for
worse, is the titular escape at Dannemora. Or, more aptly, escapes: Sweat and Matt finally
emerge on the other side of the prison walls. Tilly finally makes her choice—or,
rather, her body makes the choice for her—to abandon her fantasies about living out a dime store romance novel in some Mexican cabana, to leave Matt and Sweat
and settle for the decidedly unexciting guy who still wants to take her out for
Chinese food and then to Dairy Queen on a Friday night. This episode is taut, not only because it stages a prison break (the first one at
Clinton Correctional in 86 years, a jubilant Sweat tells Matt), but because it
weds the stakes of that escape to the fears and the desires that have driven
and dominated these characters for so long.
The
episode opens with a nearly 10-minute tracking shot that follows Sweat’s trial
run of the escape route: Stiller’s camera zooms down the long corridors and
pivots sharply yet fluidly around the turns; it reflects the running man’s
point-of-view—before panning wide on Sweat, his months of hard labor
oh-so-evident in his hardened body, moving with a martial assuredness until he
reaches the manhole that is the portal to his freedom. This shot isn’t just
technically dazzling (though it certainly is that), it articulates the character’s
kaleidoscopic array of emotions: exhilaration and anxiety, jittery anticipation
and a calm determination that feels like fate. The camera work throughout this
episode expresses everything that the characters can’t say aloud, given their
circumstances—and, more poignantly, everything they can’t admit to themselves.
Take
the sudden shift from the wide shot of Sweat, poking his head up out of that
manhole—as he breathes in the balmy air of an early summer night for the first
time in decades, the world feels so much larger, so much richer with potential.
Moments later, as he and Matt stand along their cell doors, whispering that
it’s go-time, for real this time, the frame truncates: We shift away from
Sweat, head-banging in victory, to Matt, his face closely cropped against the
bars. The tightness of the space only magnifies Benicio Del Toro’s pinched,
hesitant expression. Though the note he’ll later leave the guards defiantly
proclaims that he won’t “grow old and die” in his cell, the truth is, prison
has become kind of comfortable for Matt. The stakes and the players are so
clear, and so static, that he’s been able to perfect his art of the scheme. In
a prison stacked with narrow rows of narrow cells, run and inhabited by people
with narrow minds, his penny-ante antics feel so much more significant. On the
outside, he’ll be, to quote one Ray Liotta as one Henry Hill, just “another
schnook.”
Matt’s
trepidation manifests in his willingness to bait Lobell (aka “Murder”) into a
confrontation in the yard just hours before the escape—though he evades that
fight, leaving a gang of white nationalists to pick up the scuffle, he still
watches the guards break it up (and break some skulls) with an eerie, expectant
calm. Sweat frets a lockdown—and Matt oh-so-innocently asks a guard about it.
Del Toro gets a quicksilver micro-moment here: He must play Matt in his
familiar charmer con persona and then, when he hears that “Albany won’t approve
the manhours” for a lockdown, play a Matt who must feign relief at this news,
while letting the oh shit still slip across his face.
The
episode parallels Matt’s hesitancy to leave his snug little prison life behind
with Tilly’s revving panic about a possible life on the run: It’s grim bit of
Twilight Zone-esque karma, that the man who’s defined himself by, and survived
through, his unflappable confidence should find himself feeling just like the
bespectacled blond little mouse he’s been batting between his paws for
months—to get what he needs for his grand plan, he tells himself, but really, for
kicks. For a way to pass the time, to feel superior. “Chapter Five” punctures
Matt’s hubris and essentially reverses the dynamic between him and Sweat: Once
they finally do make their escape, and emerge out on the other side, Sweat
becomes the assured one, the leader. He’s already got a back-up plan
on-the-ready as it becomes apparent that Tilly isn’t coming—they’ll head into
the mountains and keep low until the hubbub has blown over—but Matt is
increasingly flustered that all that work he put in, all that meticulous
seducing, has come to naught. He spirals: Maybe they should go back, bro, like,
work on Tilly some more. Bro, they can’t just, like, walk into the mountains.
Maybe they should steal a car. Yeah, definitely, they should steal a car.
If
I have one quibble about this episode, and, frankly, the series, it’s that,
despite Paul Dano’s compelling performance, Sweat has been eclipsed by Matt and
Tilly. The latter two characters are more open and propulsive in their needs,
so it makes sense that they’d dominate the narrative—still, Sweat’s tactical
instincts are impressive enough that I wish I knew more about where they came
from, about who he was before he was locked up. He could have been a third
player in a dramatically-potent triad, but the writing around him has, at
times, seemed a bit perfunctory.
The
show tries to visually re-connect him with Tilly by introducing her via another
tracking shot that mimics, in its own small way, the longer one from the
opening. She badgers Lyle into stopping at a grocery store so she can get some
doughnuts, even though it’ll make them late—or, rather, precisely because it’ll
make them late. And if she’s late, maybe she won’t be able to talk to Matt,
won’t have to hear the words that will force her to make that choice between
the devil of the life she knows and the devil of the fantasy she knows will
never really happen the way she wants it to. Stiller’s camera work provides a
silent—and even more powerful for it—exposition: When Tilly is back in the
truck with Lyle on their way into work, and then leaving work for the Hunan
Wok, he holds them in a nauseating close-up, filmed from the back. We don’t
need to see Tilly’s face to be enveloped by her dread, to feel ourselves sealed
shut in the airless space of her bad choices.
Still,
Arquette masterfully portrays that dread, the slow hiss of fear and anger and
raw, ungovernable pain, over her dinner with Lyle. She is simultaneously sharp
with jagged edges—sending him away to “wash his hands” so she can drug his soda
(he’s driving, so Tilly, who’s having a hard time with a tough new officer at
the shop, can enjoy a Mexican beer in a Chinese restaurant)—and a whimpering
puddle of guilt, when she realizes that she can’t do this, any of it, and
crushes the pills under her shoe. The camera keeps its neurotically tight focus
on Arquette’s face as Tilly erupts in a full-fledged panic attack (which she
mistakes for a heart attack) and holds there for the excruciating length of time
it takes for her hospital intake.
One
could argue that this moment makes Tilly more sympathetic before her world
inevitably implodes, shrinks down to the size of her own prison cell. Still, as
someone who has suffered from panic attacks that landed me in the hospital, I
can think of no higher complement than to say that every element of this scene
reflects my experience in a way that nothing else I’ve seen on-screen ever has.
The cross-cuts between Tilly’s panic attack and Sweat and Matt making their way
through the underground corridors become something of a mercy—though the
overlaying of the nurses’ voices, soothing in their promises of peace and
sleep, as the men race their way to freedom, foreshadows that there will be no
peaceful sojourn in the mountains, no hope for any of these characters slinking
back into any kind of normalcy.