Experimenter (2015)

Bio-pic about the famed social psychologist Dr. Stanley Milgram, whose early 1960's experiments at Princeton University showed that almost all Americans were willing to subject a stranger to painful electrical shocks if asked to do so politely by a man in a lab coat. This work provided great insight into the human disposition towards obedience to authority and is now discussed in almost every college level introductory psych course, including the one I took in 2003. These experiments were to shape and define the life and career of Dr. Milgram in ways that he likely could never have anticipated, in fact it said that he never expected the results of his study to show nearly the level of blind obedience to authority that they did. These experiments both made Milgram's career and in a way limited it, despite a great deal of interesting research he conducted subsequent to the Princeton study, and which are well depicted in the film, that early work would always define his career and legacy, and give him a strong association with things Orwellian. In fact Dr. Milgram was never in greater demand on the lecture circuit then he was in that ominous year 1984, ironically the same year in which he died, he was only 51 years old.

Milgram is plaid quite well and with convincing detachment by Peter Sarsgaard, his wife Alexandra "Sasha" Milgram is played by Winona Ryder, who doesn't have that much to do in this role but it was nice to see her on the big screen again just the same. The rest of the cast is rounded out by a great number of well known actors in small supporting parts, many of them as participants in Milgram's most famous study, including Jim Gaffigan (kind of a perfect part for him), Anthony Edwards, John Leguizamo, and Taryn Manning. Dennis Haysbert is also in the film briefly playing actor Ossie Davis, he does a wonderful job of capturing that actors voice and presence, and no I'm not going to tell you why Ossie Davis would appear in a bio-pic about Stanley Milgram, you'll have to find that out on your own.

While Milgram and his work are very interesting in and of themselves, as the subject matter for a movie they have their limitations. The arc of Milgram's life in some ways lacks dramatic heft, at least of the type one generally associates with the subject of biographical film. Yes Milgram was frustrated by the way in which his career had been "typecast", but he was always able to get work in his chosen field, and for the most part seemed to have a happy and successful marriage, his widow of 30+ years Sasha never remarried and even briefly appears at the end of the film, which I think says something.

The filmmakers seem to have been aware of these limitations and sought to compensate for them in part through stylistic flourishes in presentation, which to my mind met with mixed results. Having Sarsgaard narrate the film and speak directly to the camera works, having a literal elephant walk behind him in a hallway when he discuses how being Jewish made him particularly interested in the concepts of blind obedience because of the Holocaust, that kind of works though pushes it, but having him and the other actors in color against a blown up black and white photograph of a living room when visiting the home of a colleague he's not too found of, well that mostly felt silly and a little pertinacious. The fake beard Sarsgaard wears through much of the film, also silly, but also kind of entertaining.

Experimenter is an interesting but uneven film which I was expecting to be better then I ultimately thought it was. A little too arty, a little too abstract, it never achieves the level of emotional connection with the audience that I was hopping for. Still, it's consistently interesting and at times even insightful.  **1/2