THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT – The Review

I first learned about the story of the Stanford Prison Experiment in high school. It was a journalism/newspaper class of all classes – where I had a monthly movie review column, which served as my first foray into film criticism. The idea of a psychology professor taking students and throwing them into a simulated prison system didn’t make much sense to me then. It seemed cruel and unusual, and my naïve, middle-class upbringing didn’t understand the benefit of forcing students to be cruel to other students. Never the less, that experiment conducted by Philip Zimbardo (played here in the film by Billy Crudup) in 1971 has always fascinated me due to its unusual nature.

Now that I’m older, I understand its meaning and its relevance. THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT, the film, deftly recreates these intense moments that followed over the case of several days, showing the excruciating stress and mental exhaustion it enacted on its participants. But while the film is keen on showing the excruciating parts, I’m not sure its entirely successful at relaying the mental affects it had on both the prisoners and the guards.

There’s a calculated and yet matter-of-fact precision to how director Kyle Patrick Alvarez analyzes the situation known as the Stanford Prison Experiment. He presents the “prison” scenes in such a natural light that you forget that this is intended to be a simulated experiment. The power struggle feels too real. This of course is the point. Alvarez wants the viewer to feel as if this is more than an experiment. We are meant to be caught up in the harsh reality that consumes these poor students. But since the majority of the time is spent showing the students as prison guards and prisoners, what you lose is how they feel and react when the “game” stops. What happens when the students who play the guards go home at night? What do they think of when they sleep? How do they feel about their actions? There are one or two quick scenes where the guards are switching shifts and are changing in the locker room, but they don’t amount to much and seem to only graze the surface of the psychological issues that are the underlying issue of the experiment.

The transition from school project to dangerous experiment happens almost instantaneous. Alvarez is quick to show-off the verbal abuse that the prisoners had to go through. Being so meticulous in the uncomfortable events is both good and bad. Some of the scenes are quite effective and have you feeling very uneasy. However some become tiresome given how long they go on for. One scene in particular involving the inmates repeating their prisoner ID numbers over and over again drives home the point to the audience too well. It becomes emotionally draining for the prisoners and the audience.

Ezra Miller has been a rising star in Hollywood ever since he served as a human form of birth control for newly married couples in WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN. Here, he continues to shine as the aggressive prisoner 8612/Daniel. There’s a natural passion to how he delivers dialogue and his presence is always felt, even if he’s just rolling his eyes at a guard in the background.

Billy Crudup is an actor I always think I like more than I do. Earlier in his career he wowed me in films like ALMOST FAMOUS and BIG FISH, but as of late, he continues to seem to coast on this boyish charm. His soft face accented with a slight smirk is what he rests on to get out of a scene. As the leader of the experiment, you never care what he’s thinking about or how he feels watching what is happening on his security monitors. He’s just there to serve as a cut-away – a break from the unpleasantness.

Though it often feels repetitious, Tim Talbott’s script delivers by focusing on small character interactions to push the story along. For the most part it doesn’t get preachy or try to make a point about what this says about human nature. That is until the very end. A series of exit interviews conducted with the students feels just a little too much and tacked on at the end to hammer home a message for the drive home.

THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT doesn’t build to a rousing climax as much as it slowly simmers, casually turning up the heat under you until you are just the right amount of uncomfortable. Alvarez seems to want to illustrate the events in an almost stylized documentary fashion instead of a sensationalized drama – for that I commend him. The real life experiment in 1971 marks a turning point in our country’s cultural landscape for many reasons. With the US government forcing young men to go overseas to fight in Vietnam, the shooting of unarmed college students by the National Guard on the campus of Kent State in 1970, and innocent protestors being ushered away in handcuffs on a regular basis, this tumultuous period is stained with several instances of unwarranted aggression against “weaker” individuals. Both the experiment and the film illustrate how this is possible to just ordinary men. It’s evident by this experiment that too much power is a bad thing, I just wish that the film had made more of a powerful impression on me.

Overall rating: 3 out of 5

THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT opens in St. Louis on July 31