Director Caleb Deschanel
The Escape Artist is rather muddled in development although anchored around the boy’s feelings for his absent father. It is as though the closer he gets to achieving his escapes, the closer he is to coming to terms with, or even undoing at an unconscious level, his own father’s death. He is a child prodigy whose ambitions force him to deal with the moral complexities of the adult world. He is a smart young man who triumphs over the adults around him, never letting them fully exploit him. Julia is presented as a dysfunctional child himself, a nuisance to his father the mayor, who has reached the breaking point of patience. Both O’Neal and Julia are thus in some way obsessed with, and dominated by, their fathers. Adults here are indeed deceptive tricksters (at least the boy’s relatives are open about it, transforming their con-man charade into a respectable touring act) yet overly vulnerable to the machinations of a clever, determined boy who is able to rise above circumstances and express himself, through more trickery of course. O’Neal even pursues a romantic contact with a child waitress at a diner – but this plot thread is unexpectedly abandoned part way through. The final escape sequence, however, makes for a truly captivating conclusion even if the means of getting there belies a somewhat uncertain sense of direction. Indeed, at times it is difficult to know what the film is meant to be about or if it even knows where it is heading.
As a psychological caper movie it is most intriguing, cleverly manipulating the sense of fear for this child’s safety and marvelling at his achievements and comparative togetherness. He is at a delicate point in his life and the film concertedly wonders where this young boy will head now that he is effectively without true adult guidance. He is shown being adept not only at card tricks but at pick-pocketing and in a key scene decides to keep a wallet rather than return, surrender or dispose of it. Ambiguously, the wallet becomes both the trigger for the inevitable moral consequences of his actions and his eventual means of triumphing over his surroundings, escaping from the adult yoke that would suppress or exploit him, although there is a peculiarly unexplained and undeveloped apparent telepathic link to his psychic aunt. He is astute, clearly sensing the dysfunctional aberration of the goofy Julia, a man trapped in a warped childishness. Indeed, the film in Julia equates mental aberration with an inability to mature and so too stresses O’Neal’s need to move beyond childhood as a necessity best confronted as soon as possible if survival and self-assertion are to follow. Although charming, the film never idealizes childhood and indeed seems comparable in parts (especially in the scenes with the waitress, which suggest an adult world totally occupied by children) to Alan Parker’s bizarre movie Bugsy Malone. read more