Film Review: “The Escape”
Gemma Arterton hits a career high as a mother looking for a way out
The natural progression in one’s life is to graduate college, get a job, get married, and evidently have children. It’s the social norm in today’s society. So when we see a middle aged woman without children, we think something went wrong in her life for some reason. As if she isn’t a good woman becuase she didn’t have children. But what if some women aren’t suppose to be mothers?
“The Escape” is a slow-burn character study on an unhappy mother. This story follows Tara, who’s a stay-at-home mom to two young kids and is slowly being suffociated by the day to day battle.
On the outside, Tara has everything society tells her she should have: a loving husband with a job that allows her not to work, a house, two cars, and two children (a boy and a girl). It is the picture-perfect family. But in the first shot of the film, the audience knows that she is not happy. She has no emotion on her face and apoligizes for everything (like forgetting to take the towels out of the drier for her husband). Tara is a zombie, going through the motions with the inability to connect with anyone. Until one day: she snaps.
Writer-director Dominic Savage’s film is a slow-burn minimalistic story. So in order for his film to work, he had to cast the perfect actress for his lead and stuck gold with Gemma Arterton. Known for her feisty, strong, and powerful roles, Arterton is not the obvious choice becuase Tara is none of those adjectives. She’s quiet, shy, passive, and slowly falling apart. She knows how to fix herself but is too afriad to do so, knowing that it goes against what society has told her all her life. What type of a person leaves her family?
It is not Savage’s words that move the story along, but Arterton’s physical performance. It’s the way she stares blankly ahead with her children crying on either side of her, how she looks down when talking to her husband, and the panic in her eyes when she finally decides to run away. Savage’s words are only the medocioure side to Arterton’s five-course meal. Without Arterton, this film would not have been as successful as it is. This is a career defying role for her and everyone knows it. She does have a decent supporting player in Dominic Cooper as her husband but the memorable moments in the film are just Arterton’s reactions to her circumstances, and seeing what she does next.
If you ask 100 little girls what they want to be when they grow up, most of them will say that they want to be mothers. Fast forward 30 years: what if they don’t anymore? What if they think they want to be mothers just becuase everyone told them to be mothers? What if they become mothers and then quickly realize that they made a huge mistake? We live in a society that still beleives that every woman should become a mother and that it is unnatural to not take on that role in life. In the last ten years, we have heard hundreds of women open up about postpartum depression. But what if that never goes away for some people? What if you feel like you’re trapped inside a box without the key? And the box gets smaller and smaller and smaller? You go crazy.
Savage did his best to tell this incredibility complicated character-study without being offensive (not many people can or want to sympathize with a mother that leaves her family). But he’s not here to challange your definiton of a mother, he just gives you a snapshot of Tara’s life. There are few answers to the questions a viewer can come up with during the film. But this film isn’t about answering questions like “why are some mothers unhappy?”. It’s about the experience of pressured and unsatisfied mothers. It’s about the people who follow society’s rules and then figure out it’s not for them.
The result is a real, raw, and effective experience.
