Peter Sarsgaard, Winona Ryder are wacky, engaging in 'Experimenter'
Peter Sarsgaard stars as psychologist Stanley Milgram in Experimenter, which inventively recreates his shocking research into obediance and authority.
The rebellion against biopic formularity, evident in "Steve Jobs," continues in the wacky, engaging "Experimenter."
This movie takes a look at the life and work of social scientist Stanley Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard), who, at one point, can be seen walking down a hallway trailed by an elephant.
Milgram never worked with elephants. The pachyderm is a pun - the proverbial elephant in the room. It arrives in "Experimenter" just as Milgram explains that his infamous experiments at Yale in the early 1960s were inspired by an interest in the Holocaust, in particular the way human beings are conditioned to respond to authority.
Milgram's research project is recreated here with just the barest hint of comedy, suggested by the presence of stand-up Jim Gaffigan. Test subjects are brought to a room and told to pose a series of questions to an apparently random stranger (Gaffigan). If the answers are incorrect, the test subjects administer an electric shock that gets stronger as questions are answered incorrectly.
Gaffigan's "victim" (no actual shocks occurred) can often be heard begging for mercy in the other room, but the shock-a-thon invariably continues, as subjects are told to do by a man in the room wearing a white lab coat and a furrowed brow.
Milgram looks pitilessly on from a concealed two-way mirror as his ideas about situational obedience are confirmed and reconfirmed. That point calls into question Milgram's own capacity for cruelty, adding to his strange celebrity (he published a book and appeared on "The Dick Cavett Show," recreated here).
As we watch Milgram watch his perverse little drama, we are made uncomfortably aware of our own voyeurism - Sarsgaard breaks the fourth wall, starts talking to us directly, making us co-experimenters, or co-conspirators.
Director Michael Almereyda's movie is full of these eccentric meta-flourishes - in one sequence, "Experimenter" takes us back to the 1970s TV movie based on Milgram's work (it starred William Shatner and Ossie Davis, played here by Kellan Lutz and Dennis Haysbert, respectively).
But this isn't just a director showing off and having fun with an offbeat screenplay. Almereyda is actively challenging us to take a fresh, complicated look at Milligram's research.
This is a nice change from last year's successful if conventional biopics about Stephen Hawking and Alan Turing, which soft-pedaled the underlying science.
"Experimenter," even at a scant 90 minutes, delves deeply into Milgram's Yale experiments and provides additional information on his less-famous work - he introduced the idea of six degrees of separation, to Kevin Bacon's eternal regret.
"Experimenter" presents Milgram as a phlegmatic and borderline icy fellow. To that end, the movie requires an actor who can be stoic while suggesting a lively if insulated intellect (we see why he's attractive to his wife, played by Winona Ryder).
I'd say Sarsgaard is the perfect guy. His work, as usual, is subtle, perceptive and dry-as-dust funny in a way appropriate to the role. It's not the kind of work that gets nominated, but it's well worth seeing.
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