Sundance: Brian Cox Twice

This year at Sundance, Stanley Tucci, Patricia Clarkson, Tom Sizemore, and Emily Blunt are in two films each, and that’s just a quick list of actorly doppelgangers off the top of my head. I’m sure I’ve missed a few others. Last year it was Parker Posey and Zooey Deschanel who kept popping up.

I don’t mind this at all but mention it only as a warning: when you tell someone that you liked the film starring Brian Cox, you need to be very clear that you mean The Escapist and not Red.

The Escapist, directed by Rupert Wyatt, is a high-octane, efficiently told story from the UK about a prison break, with just the exciting bits, no boring setup, scrambled chronologically into a complex web of suspense. It runs along two tracks: one shows us the escape itself—which begins with the film’s first shot—and the other flashes back to Cox and a band of accomplices who are planning their flight to freedom.

Twisting together a pair of contrapuntal timelines isn’t easy. Ask William Faulkner. Most of the time, I like one thread and dread the inevitable return to the other, especially if the storyteller seems to be stretching one of the threads into a languorous dead zone just to make its events line up properly with the action in the other one.

But in this case, the two lines push each other along. The escape is where the good stuff would normally be, but the flashbacks feed us context for the actions that we just saw or the ones we’re about to, and I found that I looked forward to the switches because of the satisfying way the threads snap together.

Swifter, grittier, and louder than the typical jailbreak movie—no one will mistake it for Bresson’s contemplative A Man Escaped nor Darabont’s sentimental Shawshank Redemption—The Escapist still falls firmly within the tradition of underground break-outs. This maximum security prison is devoid of computers, TVs, or high-tech weight machines, and its stacked tiers of barred passageways, its master light switch that echos with a thunk, and its social spaces of dangerous men paint a picture of a classic stoney lonesome like Alcatraz, so I wasn’t even sure when the film takes place until the end when we get a few more clues. Until then, we know that Cox has a flip clock in his cell and that the laundry room has a giant tumble dryer, which put the film sometime in the last 30 or 40 years, I guess, but otherwise its a film of pure, old-fashioned dirt, steel, flashlights, and torches.

The other Brian Cox film in this year’s festival is Red, directed by Trygve Allister Diesen and Lucky McKee. Although Cox does his best to sell it, I just didn’t buy the story of the old man (Cox) whose dog, good ‘ol Red, is senselessly shot by a roving band of wealthy punks while he and Red are fishin’ at the lake just outside of town, triggering a rash of outsized vigilante justice that grows more ludicrous by the minute.

In a festival with several fantastic American dramas, Red effectively underlines their greatness by being exactly what they are not. Its attempts to deal with themes of age and class and family are as fake and meat-fisted as the great films are precise and empathetic.