Frequent readers of this blog undoubtedly know my feelings
on the biopic genre of film, how it has stagnated into a state of formula that
tries to force the life story of every individual with the least amount of
public notoriety into the mold of a three act structure, whether the story
fits that inspirational model or not.
Consequently, good biopics are hard to find these days, and the ones
that do work are the ones that are more about specific events than the emotional
journeys of the people who shaped them. Experimenter is a great example of a
step in that direction. It admittedly is
subject to some pitfalls of its genre, but this is a film that knows where the
heart of its story resides and isn’t afraid to defy convention to show it to
us.
Experimenter is
the story of the famous obedience experiments conducted by psychologist Stanley
Milgram (an appropriately clinical Peter Sarsgaard). The goal of the experiment was to determine
to what extent subjects would act in deference to a perceived authority,
administering what they believed to be increasing electric shocks to a fellow
test subject (in reality an actor who was in on the experiment) at the behest
of an insistent official. The shocks
were not real, but the ethics of the psychological impact on the test subject
have been debated to this day, though the study’s findings about the pliability
of human will are also relevantly discussed with just as much fervor.
What the film does right is that it is primarily about the
tests themselves and about the impact of those tests in the following
decades. The first act is almost
entirely within the testing room, and we see test subjects react in a multitude
of ways, yet almost always they end up giving the maximum voltage shock to
their victim at the behest of the experimenter.
A central question that the narrative poses is what the line is between
our self-perception and what our reality actually is: how far would any of us
actually go to remain deferent to authority and how much of our individuality
is a lie? A fascinating technique the
film uses to communicate this non-verbally is to have Milgram monologue
directly into the camera and to set the film against obviously artificial
backdrops, using the obvious fiction of cinema to emphasize the surreality of the story without undermining the
truth of the study it presents.
There are moments, however, where the film does stumble into
portraying the drama of Milgram’s personal life, and those attempts feel token,
feeble, and unwelcome. They don’t arise
often and are edited in such a way as to suggest that director
Michael Almereyda knows that these moments are a distraction and wants to get
them out of the way as soon as possible.
It’s largely unnecessary to go through a checklist of Milgram’s other
notable experiments or look in on how his marriage developed over the years,
yet here we are, going through the motions of a standard biopic when both the
film and, hopefully, its audience are much more interested in the man’s work
than the irrelevant parts of his life.
I do want to emphasize, though, that these moments are
minimized and are more likely included because of a producer’s demand than the
director’s vision. When taken as a
whole, Experimenter won’t likely blow
anyone’s mind, but it is an entertaining and highly stylized look at one of the
most important social experiments of the twentieth century, a glimpse into the
human mind at the conscious mechanisms that allowed events such as the
Holocaust to happen. And it works
primarily because it does not attempt to portray Milgram as a hero on a
journey; he’s just a man who conducted an important and controversial
experiment, and the drama of that can speak for itself.
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