the escapist

One thing The Escapist is not, Gillies Mackinnon insists, is a prison picture - certainly not in the sense that The Big House or Birdman of Alcatraz were prison pictures. Mackinnon’s latest film tells the story of Denis (Jonny Lee Miller), a man whose life is shattered by a single criminal act in which his young wife is killed in a bungled break-in attempt by a career criminal called Ricky Barnes (Andy Serkis). Denis, for whom life up to then had seemed perfect, cannot cope with his loss, and dedicates his life to tracking down the man responsible. It is a pursuit which requires him not only to be sent to jail, but to be sent to the worst - or, as the prison service would have it, the most secure - jail in Britain: Sullen Voe.

The screenplay (by Nick Perry) is precisely the kind of project that was likely to appeal to the Scottish-born Mackinnon, whose taste has never been for standard-issue stories. Regeneration, based on Pat Barker’s prize-winning novel and featured in Preview 28 four years ago this month, was about the treatment of soldiers suffering from shellshock during the First World War. Hideous Kinky (also featured in Preview some 18 months later in issue 36,) starred Kate Winslet as a young woman who takes her children to Morocco in the late sixties, discovering in the process those areas where freedom and responsibility, rebellion and tradition collide.

More recently, Mackinnon directed acclaimed TV drama The Last of the Blonde Bombshells, about a group of women musicians who reunite long after their wartime fame. If there is one thing that links the films, it is that they are about characters who have to examine their motives in ways which they may not have anticipated. They are films about people, but people caught up in difficult, if not impossible, decisions.

The Escapist, too, involves a character pushed to - and at times beyond - the brink: a man who embarks on a course of perilous action rather than try to deal with the crisis that has destroyed his life. But Denis’ apparently simple motivation - that of revenge - becomes less and less simple as it takes over his life.

“He’s not really brave, because he’s not dealing with the things he should be dealing with,” says Miller. “He has a very twisted outlook on how he should make things better. All he can see is the injustice, and he doesn’t look at things he should really be doing in his life.”

“It’s a story of nemesis,” explains Mackinnon. “Denis fakes his own suicide and goes into the prison system, obsessively seeking this man who killed his wife. He becomes an ‘escapist’ in order to become a ‘Category A’ prisoner and end up in Sullen Voe, this maximum security unit where he knows Ricky Barnes is. In a way, it’s a David and Goliath story, because he’s going into the lair of the snake. Sullen Voe is Ricky Barnes’ territory, where he can’t be touched, and Denis is going in there to kill him. It’s heroic, in the sense that he’s going to meet his greatest fear.

Jonny Lee Miller with Jodhi May

“I can’t really think of another film that this relates to particularly,” continues the director. “I don’t think that prison is what the story is about in the end. Denis is escaping life: he can’t face up to it, because he’s obsessed with this grief and this obsession with revenge. It’s like he’s escaping from the responsibility to which he ultimately has to return. It feels to me more of a mythological story, where he tracks down this man who has ruined his life. He can’t put his own life at peace and he can’t put it back together again until he has done that.”