JULY 22, 2015
In 1971, Stanford University psychology professor Philip Zimbardo set out to discover whether the cause of prison violence between guards and inmates rests not in outside forces but in personality traits. His team selected 24 male students and assigned them the roles of either guards or prisoners in a simulated correctional facility on campus. (Interestingly, when given the choice, most of the candidates chose to be prisoners ostensibly because it meant less work.)
This experiment has been the subject of two previous films, the German “Das Experiment” (2001) and the American remake “The Experiment” (2010). In this film, the “guards” and “prisoners” initially play act between giggles, but things soon turn serious when one of the guards (Michael Angarano), a preppie whose personality darkly changes when given a uniform, a nightstick and aviator shades, takes on the persona of the Strother Martin “failure to communicate” character from “Cool Hand Luke” to keep the prisoners in line.
He soon finds his “Luke,” Number 8612 (Ezra Miller), who among other prisoners who accept their role, stands up to defy the status quo. The interplay between the two actors is mesmerizing, but the film soon becomes an exercise in frustration when these two have so few scenes together. 8612 soon leaves the film, and much of the film’s tension leaves with him. New shifts are brought in with less interesting characters which, while possibly staying true to the reality of the experiment, flatline the drama of the moment. If only Angarano and Miller could have had a McMurphy/Nurse Ratched film built around them, this would be an extremely memorable remake.
Billy Crudup plays Zimbardo as some kind of goateed Mephistopheles, manipulating the prisoners’ fate from his control room. He’s fine, if a bit heavy-handed. The screenplay by Tim Talbott is appropriately minimal, but misses the opportunity that more conflict between the two leads could have brought to the project. Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s direction emphasizes the claustrophobia of the situation but lacks focus. Gripping at times, but ultimately, a swing and a miss.
GRADE: C+
