When Fred Armisen was part of Saturday Night Live, one of his best recurring characters was Nicholas Fehn, a pretentious and painfully unfunny comic who fancied himself a political satirist. His routine would be to read headlines from, say, The Wall Street Journal and then offer his own “skewed view” of the news items. But Fehn never actually did that: Instead, after reading the headline he would immediately become apoplectic and inarticulate, as if there was nothing that needed to be said about corporate media or other sitting-duck topics because we already understood how ridiculous they were. Fehn’s misplaced smugness—his utter assurance that by simply mentioning certain topics he was tapping into a collective disgust—was endlessly delicious. The character was a helpful reminder that no matter how deserving a satiric target was, it still had to be torpedoed properly.
The great failing of Escape From Tomorrow is that it suffers from the same malady as Fehn. The feature debut of writer-director Randy Moore has a juicy cultural totem in its sights, the Disney empire, but it misses more than it hits. Worse, the misses often work under the belief that it doesn’t necessarily matter—we all hate Disney already, so we’ll happily forgive any comedic misfires because of the filmmaker’s worthy intentions. Perhaps that’s true to a degree, but not to the level Moore hopes.
The story behind the making of Escape From Tomorrow is more riveting than the film’s actual plot, which by design wanders and meanders, sometimes stumbling into surreal territory. Escape From Tomorrow is set at Walt Disney World in Florida, and much of the movie was shot on the park grounds, without permission. Consequently, Moore had to shoot covertly, hoping not to attract attention while he and his cast filmed scenes in and around Epcot, Space Mountain and the “It’s a Small World” ride. When Escape From Tomorrow premiered at Sundance, audiences reacted in part to Moore’s audacity: He made a film criticizing the Disney-fication of American life that defied the company by shooting within one of its major tourist attractions without its knowledge.
The film has managed to secure a release after some legal wrangling, and while Moore’s guerilla instincts are to be saluted, his filmmaking shortcomings are not. There are ideas here—about Disney’s pervasive grip on our culture, about the collapse of the family unit, about the temptation to escape reality for a prepackaged fantasy life—but they only come through in drips and drabs. As for the basic building blocks of story—characters, performance, narrative—they’re even shakier.
Escape From Tomorrow stars Roy Abramsohn as Jim, a disgruntled everyman who has taken his family (including his critical wife, Emily, played by Elena Schuber) to Disney World, only to learn near the end of the trip that he’s been fired from his job. Hiding that fact from his wife and kids, Jim just wants to enjoy one last day in the park, but soon he begins to experience strange visions. Is his son Elliot (Jack Dalton) possessed by an evil spirit? And why does he find himself compelled to pursue two alluring French teens (Danielle Safady and Annet Mahendru) who are traipsing around the park?