The Milgram obedience experiment is one of the most fascinating inquiries into human psychology, and its results have deeply influenced our understanding of the human animal and its capacity for resistance to conformity (Milgram was driven by a desire to understand how the Holocaust could have happened, and he designed the experiment around the time that SS official Adolf Eichmann was on trial). That alone would seem to make it an ideal subject for a film, but as Michael Almereyda’s Experimenter makes clear, you need more than an intriguing social experiment to drive a feature-length film. Specifically, we need an equally intriguing protagonist, and despite Milgram’s brilliance in designing experimental conditions, as depicted in the film by Peter Sarsgaard, he is not a terribly interesting person. His cool, dry, sometimes melancholy personality is fitting for a social psychologist interested in exploring the darker recesses of humanity, but not for the emotional center of a film, and as a result Experimenter is all chilly surface, going through the motions of recreating the important points of Milgram’s adult life and most famous experiments (including one that coined the term “six degrees of separation), but it never gets beneath the lab coat.

His relationship with Sasha (Winona Ryder), a woman he meets on an elevator and ends up marrying has no real weight or vibrancy, even when their marriage appears to be falling apart. Some of the film’s best moments are in the recreations of Milgram’s experiments, which allows for some marginal characters with interesting personalities to emerge, particularly Jim Gaffigan’s boisterous James McDonough, who plays the confederate who is supposedly being shocked by people who are repeatedly told that they have to continue with the experiment, even when they are clearly uncomfortable (many of the subjects are played by familiar character actors, including Anthony Edwards and John Leguizamo). The only time Milgram has any fire is when he’s responding to critics of his work, who reliably misunderstand or mischaracterize it, perhaps because they find the results too unnerving to deal with. As he says of his experiment, “The results are terrifying and depressing. They suggest that the kind of character produced in American society can’t be counted on to insulate its citizens from brutality and inhumane treatment in response to a malevolent authority.”

Perhaps as an antidote to the relatively dry nature of the story, writer/director Michael Almereyda infuses the film with a number of theatrical tricks, including having Milgram break the fourth wall and talk directly to the audience and using patently fake backgrounds at various points, as if we are on a stage with a projected backdrop. He also employs overt, overly literal symbolism, such as a scene in which Milgram is walking down a hall talking about something that might be considered “the elephant in the room,” and what walks down the hall behind him but a giant elephant? Although he has directed numerous films in a wide variety of styles, Almereyda is probably best known for two unconventional Shakespeare adaptations, Hamlet (2000) and Cymbeline (2014), both of which starred Ethan Hawke and updated the Bard’s stories to contemporary environments (the corporate boardroom and rival motorcycle gangs, respectively). The use of the overtly theatrical in Experimenter is ostensibly daring in the same vein, as it infuses the familiar beats of the “Great Man Biopic” with an unconventional aesthetic approach, but because Milgram comes across as such a vague, largely uninteresting character, the film’s design feels more desperate than engaging.

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

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