Review of The Stanford Prison Experiment (2015) by Reuben M — 05 Nov 2018

Although I've since changed careers rather significantly, I am a theater graduate and spent years working in theater. My strongest feeling while watching STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT was "this could easily have been a play rather than a movie and it would have been 10x more powerful." It is already a story mostly confined to a tiny area, and it features almost nothing in the way of cinematic artistry. The acting, while often good, is mostly pitched at a slightly exaggerated level that would work much better on stage. The dialogue is a bit "stagey" too. And things like cinematography are uninspiring and unrevealing.

BUT, it isn't a play...it's a low-budget movie with an interesting cast, an interesting story and a deep, deep need for an editor. The film runs just over 2 hours, and should EASILY have come in at 90 minutes. In case you don't know, this is a true story, about a 1971 "experiment" conducted by a Stanford research psychologist in 1971. He hired a bunch of students (at $15 per day) to take on the role of either prisoner or guard. Other than telling the guards they couldn't physically hurt anyone...they could pretty much do what they wanted. The scariest thing the experiment teaches is not that under these circumstances, the guards might be come cruel and the prisoners terrified and dehumanized. It's HOW FAST it all happens. The movie also shows what a horribly conceived experiment it was, and how terribly the psychologist and his colleagues got sucked into playing their own "roles" in this scenario. It's pretty amazing that people didn't go to jail and the looney bin for this little game.

The young men are played by a wide variety of interesting actors such as the always good Tye Sheridan (MUD) and the fascinating Ezra Miller (WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN). Miller is a pretty compelling and interesting film actor, but in this project, he's just a bit over the top. His character's arc is clumsily written, granted, but he could have overcome this better. He's a great example of what I said above...if this same performance were transported to a theatre with an audience of about 900, it would be thrilling. Here, where we can see him up close, it's just a bit too much. Billy Crudup, as the shrink, perhaps fares best of all because he doesn't forget that in film, less is often more. He does a convincing job portraying a man who fools himself into thinking his "game" is advancing human knowledge in a useful way, and not just destroying the psyches of all involved.

It's not a FUN movie to watch...and many of the scenes of tormenting the prisoners drag on too long or are too repetitive. It's as though the director and writer thought they had to make their point over and over and over. It just became a bit mundane. (Perhaps that was the point...but what it really did was kind of grind the momentum to a halt after the film gets of to a brisk start.) This is worth seeing, but it's also not the earth-shattering revelation it wants to be.