Ebertfest Review: Escape From Tomorrow

Credit should be given where it’s due: “Escape From Tomorrow,” which may just be the most talked about movie you will never get a chance to see, was a near impossible film to make.

Shot on the fly and on the run in both Disneyworld and Disneyland, two places where the use of cameras for commercial use is strictly forbidden, first time Director Randy Moore has made a daring, stylish and damned strange film that ties the Happiest Place on Earth to sexual perversion, fatherly trauma, conglomerate conspiracy and personal psychosis. Moore should be applauded for finding a way against all odds to put Disney’s head on the chopping block.

And yet in another way, Disney is something of an easy target. The legacy left by Walt has such an oddly glowing reputation that they’ve always seemed like they have the farthest to fall. Even institutions like “The Simpsons” have recognized the almost surreal annoyance brought on by “It’s a Small World After All” and “Zip a Dee Do Dah.” If you’re going to make a Lynchian mind-bender, you’d better have immensely strong imagery that can go beyond the Disney gimmick, and you better know exactly what movie you want to make so that people aren’t just amused by the novelty of it.

“Escape From Tomorrow” begins on a family of four’s last day in Disneyworld. The father, Jim (Roy Abramsohn), has just lost his job over the phone, and the kids are getting restless after a long trip. As they ride the monorail, Moore’s stark black and white cinematography captures even something as small as the automated closing doors with spectral resonance. There’s a sense from the first moment that this day will deteriorate quickly, and your uncertainty as to what you’re watching never goes away.

Sharing the train with the family are two 15-year-old French girls. They smile and giggle incessantly, they swivel around the train’s inside pole and show off their legs in slutty cutoffs and tops, and Jim can’t avert his eyes. After he and his wife Emily (Elena Schuber) take each child on separate rides, Jim ends up tailing the girls around the park with his son Elliot (Jack Dalton).

The movie watches the teens eat bananas and get wet in the pool and the sun, and the goofy, cheap sexual imagery makes “Escape From Tomorrow” feel campier than the surreal tone established from the start. It only continues to amplify Jim’s perversion without really adding new pieces to the equation. There’s a middle-aged cougar with a ruby necklace who ends up sleeping with Jim before he realizes he’s committing adultery. Her secret gets at the strange truth that a place like Disneyworld can’t really be happy all the time, but the character is staged in such a way that she feels like an unintentionally funny diversion.

Before long, “Escape From Tomorrow” explodes with bright, energetic and near incomprehensible imagination just as the evening’s Epcot fireworks begin. Moore smacks an intermission into the only 103-minute film and returns with a scathingly bizarre look at one of Disney’s corporate sponsors.

All this is definitely unsettling, but it’s a mess, even for a wet dream or nightmare. Does the film improve as the Earth seems to shatter and the figurative exorcisms take place, or does it take away from the small-scale psychological drama “Escape From Tomorrow” began as?

I hate to say “Escape From Tomorrow” has been overrated and overhyped, because here is a film that may yet get stomped flat by Disney’s PR powerhouse, and Moore needs all the positive exposure he can get.

I got the chance to see the film at Ebertfest, only a few months after it hit viral status at this year’s Sundance. Moore spoke of how for him, Disneyworld soon became inseparable from his father, and it somewhat estranged them in the process. I’m not sure I can look more fondly on one or the other now, but the best praise I can give is that “Escape From Tomorrow” is also now inseparable from Disneyworld in my mind.

3 stars