EXPERIMENTER – The Review

Magnolia Pictures

By Sam Moffitt

If you were asked to participate in a behavioral science study, and got paid for it, and the study involved torturing and possibly killing another human being, would you see the study through to its end? Would you continue to administer electric shocks to a complete stranger, a person who has already said they have a heart condition?

Now, you cannot see the other person, as you administer the electric shocks from another room, but you can hear them beg for mercy, hear them ask to stop the experiment, and then finally grow silent, possibly unconscious or maybe even dead.

Would you continue the experiment? Especially if there were an ”authority figure” wearing a gray lab coat who insisted that you had to continue the experiment, no matter what. Especially that you had to continue even if you thought you were killing the other test subject, another human being.

Most people would say no, most people if asked straight up if they would do such a thing would claim they could not consider it. Yet, a series of tests administered by Stanley Milgram in 1961 proved that most people will go ahead and give what they think are ever increasing electric shocks to a perfect stranger, if someone in authority tells them they have to.

EXPERIMENTER tells the fascinating story of how Milgram came to run these tests and the fire storm of controversy they created, shock waves from which are still being felt to this day.

I can recall taking a class in psychiatry at Jefferson Junior College in Hillsboro, Missouri in the early 80s and reading about Milgram’s experiments.  Many in the fields of psychiatry, psychology and sociology were quick to denounce Milgram’s tests and what they seemed to prove.  That people can be ordered to do anything, as long as someone in authority gives them the go ahead.

Milgram’s experiments were not created in a political vacuum.  World War II was still recent news in 1961.  Milgram was Jewish, his parents were both lucky enough to leave Europe before the Nazi’s came to power and started the Holocaust which cost the lives of 9 million people, most of them Jewish.

Milgram’s primary focus was “why would otherwise sane, rational, moral people participate in mass murder ?”  Milgram and his team of researchers were shocked and saddened to see that most people, against their own moral code and conscience, if told to do so would go ahead and keep administering the electric shocks to an unseen but heard victim.  The cries for help were tape recorded by the way, no one was ever really shocked in these experiments.

EXPERIMENTER is quite simply an astonishing movie with a message that really needs to be seen by every man, woman and child on this planet.  The Nazi Holocaust was just one incident of mass murder that continues to happen all over our world.  People in every nation on Earth have proven over and over that they will pull the trigger on innocent people, if someone in “Authority” tells them they are obligated to do so.  Milgram’s research was denounced because the truth hurts.

Peter Sarsgaard gives an incredible performance, somewhat similar to Oscar Issac in A Most Violent Year.  Milgram speaks in well modulated, precise sentences.  He appears to be what he is, a well educated, thoughtful academic committed to his research and insistent on telling his results to the world.

Winona Ryder (and how nice to see her in a lead performance again) is very good as Milgram’s wife but the script really doesn’t give her much to do except be a dutiful wife defending her husband’s work.

We see how even in the 60s the media would pounce on any new “scandal” and distort the original intent of a new piece of work.  Milgram appeared on Dick Cavett, among other talk shows.  His research was dramatized on television.  He was both denounced and praised.  He and his team conducted other tests, most notably a test involving letters left on car windshields that needed to be mailed, to a fictitious person, to test how honest people might be.

His own students did not believe him the day he announced that President John Kennedy had been shot; they assumed it was another test.

EXPERIMENTER was filmed in a highly stylized manner.  Most of the sets are not only obviously sets but some appear to be painted flats only, much like Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, only minus the expressionist styles.  In the driving scenes old fashioned rear projection is used, highlighting the unreality of the film itself.  In a couple of scenes we even, literally, see “the elephant in the room.”  Of course none of the characters take note.

I have written of this before, Experimenter is the kind of movie that deserves a wide audience; it needs to be exhibited in theaters.  But I doubt that it will, it is not a blockbuster type of film, EXPERIMENTER is wise, thoughtful, intelligent and has something serious to say about the human condition, in all of us.  Pretty much the kiss of death at the multiplex. Please don’t pass this one up.

OVERALL RATING: 5 OUT OF 5 STARS

EXPERIMENTER is playing in theaters now

For a list of theaters and On Demand, visit:
http://www.magpictures.com/experimenter/