Shock value
Peter Sarsgaard pushes buttons…
Self-awareness can stifle a film, but in the case of Michael Almereyda’s alt-biopic it’s bang on the money. With the dial marked ‘meta’ cranked to 11, Almereyda (1994’s Nadja, 2000’s Hamlet) cannily explores blind obedience in a manner demanding questioning responses. Fourth walls break, backdrops are brazenly faked: and as a film experiment about experiments emerges, twists on biopic cliché (and random elephant cameos) keep it from calcifying in smart-arsed self-importance.
The experimenter is famous psychologist Stanley Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard), who in 1961 coerced volunteers to test others with memory questions. Most questioners complied when asked to issue electro-shocks (increasing in voltage) for every fluffed answer, not knowing the ‘victim’ was an actor. By exploring people’s willingness to administer pain under lab-coated instruction, Milgram raised spiky questions about authority and deferred ethics; Sarsgaard’s to-camera voiceover rams the Holocaust theme home.
Milgram’s subjects (including Taryn Manning and Anton Yelchin) and wife (a topform Winona Ryder) brim with life, yet he remains remote, deliberately so: Milgram’s detachment keeps us inquisitive, a response galvanised by ideas about means and ends, career and character, deceit and discipline.
Frisky formal tricks chivvy the plot along, as do deliciously droll comic diversions including a JFK episode and a William Shatner movie about Milgram. Sarsgaard’s Milgram despairs of Shatner’s film. But you suspect he’d be happier with Almereyda’s playful interrogation: a direct-to-disc teaser
Kevin Harley worth seeking out.
Extras › Gag reel