by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After The Psycho She Met Online Lifetime showed a movie they’d been heavily hyping
for weeks now: New York Prison Break: The Seduction of Joyce Mitchell, based on a real-life New York prison escape from
the Clinton Correctional Facility in June 2015. The escape, in which two
convicts with the unfortunate names David Sweat (Joe Anderson) and Richard Matt
(Myk Watford) broke out and had help doing so from two prison employees, Joyce
Mitchell (Penelope Ann Miller) and Gene Palmer — and were at large for three
weeks before Matt was shot down while threatening police with a shotgun and
Sweat was taken alive two days later — made national news. Indeed, I can
remember thinking when the story broke, “Someday this will be made into a
Lifetime movie” — and now here it is. It’s also quite well done, written and
directed by Stephen Tolkin — who’s done reality-based Lifetime movies before,
including The Craigslist Killer
and Cleveland Abduction, and also
has some feature-film credits — and vividly acted by the three principals as
well as by Daniel Roebuck as Joyce’s husband Lyle, a hapless guy with a
penchant for boring the shit out of her with conversational rambles. He’s still
turned on by her but she couldn’t be less interested in him — they both work at
the local prison and at one point, when he finally suspects she’s smuggling contraband
to the prisoners, chews her out for jeopardizing these great jobs they both
have, making $50,000 a year each with full health coverage, including dental
(reinforcing how prisons have become one of the few industries where
well-paying blue-collar jobs are still available — reason enough for
working-class voters to support candidates who are “tough on crime”) — even
though, as she tells Sweat one day when they’re alone together in the storeroom
of the prison’s tailor shop (they make uniforms for the New York state police),
she was carrying on an affair with Lyle while still married to husband number
one, and in one particular throe of passion they were caught screwing on the
railroad tracks behind where they worked. “Didn’t you get splinters?” Sweat asks
— though the message Joyce’s story sends him is that here is a woman with a
strong sex drive who’d be a sitting duck for a concentrated seduction campaign
and would be willing to do anything
for a man who’d give her ashes a good hauling, or even throw hints in that
direction. We also know that about Joyce because we see her in bed — her
husband is there but she’s ignoring him, and he’s already nodding off while she
has earbuds on and is listening to a particularly lubricious soft-core porn
passage in an audiobook version of a romance novel.
Actually Joyce never gets
it on with Sweat — even when she’s caught after the escape and interrogated,
and is admitting to just about everything she did (including smuggling the
prisoners hacksaw blades and evading the metal detectors by stuffing them in
hamburger meat and freezing it), she insists that she and Sweat were never
lovers, though she and the much homelier Matt were. We’re told in the dialogue
that he has an especially impressive “manhood,” and we get an unmistakable
scene in that storeroom in which Joyce gives him oral sex and then he pulls her
up for the full “treatment.” Despite its rather clinical title, New
York Prison Break works on just about every
level, from the intrinsic kinky interest of the story to the highly atmospheric
direction Tolkin gives it, to the Hitchcockian game he plays throughout where
he shows so much detail of how Sweat and Matt are literally digging their way out of the prison we end up
rooting for them to succeed even though Tolkin tried to forestall that sort of
moral reversal by beginning his film with a graphic depiction of the crime
Sweat and Matt committed (a robbery of a gun store that included shooting down
a police officer and torturing the gun-store owner into revealing the location
of a secret cash stash the crooks believed he had even though we suspect that,
like the victims of In Cold Blood,
the “stash” was just a rumor in the crime world and didn’t actually exist).
Most prison-escape movies hedge their bets by making the prisoners sympathetic
and the jailers the bad guys — either they’re Nazis running a concentration
camp or the authorities on Devil’s Island or some such place lording it over
unjustly convicted victims — but in this one the bad guys are bad guys, and yet through Tolkin’s writing and
direction and the appropriately edgy acting of Anderson and Watford they come
off as just the sort of sexually irresistible studs that might turn on a woman
like Joyce Mitchell full of unfulfilled sexual longings and desires. Penelope
Ann Miller’s performance as Joyce is also excellent, particularly when she
switches from bored housewife and career woman to acting like a giddy teenager
in the first throes of romantic passion when she gets lurid notes from Sweat
and contemplates a future with him on the outside — a dream of hers he, of
course, has no intention of fulfilling! Miller manages to bring her (and the
character’s) actual age (the actress herself is 53 and looks it — a
well-preserved 53, but still 53) and her teenage-style immaturity in her crush
on Sweat (even though it’s Matt, not Sweat, who does the down-’n’-dirty with
her — and we see her fantasy of the three of them in Mexico jointly canoodling
at a beach resort) into a nerve-wracking and rather repulsive juncture that
makes us want to walk into the screen and tell her, “Just act your age already!”
New York Prison Break is obviously an exploitation film aimed at taking
advantage of the publicity surrounding the real event, and yet it’s also a
finely honed piece of drama — not a great film by any means, but a solidly
appealing one that manages to offer quality entertainment and is particularly
good at dramatizing the sexual frustration that leads Joyce Mitchell to her
fatal infatuation with Sweat and Matt. (One thing Tolkin’s focus on Joyce’s
literal and figurative
“seduction” led him to do was write Gene Palmer, the other prison employee who
helped the two men escape, entirely out of the story — as well as anyone else
on the prison staff who might have aided and abetted the escapees: at least
some members of New York state law enforcement were convinced that other prison
employees besides Mitchell and Palmer helped the escape, even though Mitchell
and Palmer were the only two people charged and convicted of doing so.) New
York Prison Break is a fun movie,
appealingly dark without being so
gloomy as to be unwatchable, and where Tolkin scores best is in the clashes
between the three main characters — Mitchell the infatuated mature woman (it’s
established that she’s already a grandmother) who’s acting like a giddy
teenager; Matt the confident seducer who’s able to get what he wants with his
gifts as an artist (he paints quite a few pictures, including ones of Mitchell
and other prison staffers which he trades for favors, and he has one of Marilyn
Monroe in his cell) and a lover; and Sweat the callous but deliciously hunky
brute (hell, if he were really as Joe Anderson plays him I’d have probably had the hots for him!) who’s willing
to exploit not only Joyce but Matt as well — in one of the film’s most chilling
scene, after the two have broken out together (and after Sweat has peremptorily
told Matt he won’t be included in the escape unless he loses enough pounds to
be able to fit through the prison’s ventilation pipes they’re going to use as
part of their way out), Sweat dumps Matt and tells him that now that his plans
have changed and they’re fleeing to Canada instead of Mexico, he won’t need
Matt because the only reason he included Matt was that Matt spoke Spanish and
he doesn’t have to have a Spanish-speaker on board if he’s going to Canada
instead. New York Prison Break is
the sort of quirky delight that keeps us unlikely Lifetime buffs watching this
often exploitative (particularly in their “reality” series, less so in their movies)
but also often oddly compelling network.
