What Is<em> Escape at Dannemora</em>, Really?
The final episode of Showtime’s , which runs an astonishing one hour and 38 minutes long, is actually a pretty dazzling movie. Ben Stiller, its director (yes, Ben Stiller), crafts a tight, poetically beautiful narrative of escape in the misty blue mountains of the North Country—the kind of tense, thoughtful, slightly surreal drama that contrasts America’s most stunning landscapes with its bleak scenes of rural despair. It’s grim (particularly after Benicio del Toro’s character, Richard Matt, disregards advice not to drink from a pool of standing water). It’s darkly funny (“I knew you were having an affair on me,” one character bleats, “when you started ordering off the diet menu at King’s Wok”). It ends with a scene that’s cryptically ambiguous,
