Cancelled For Lack of InterestFor the first time, I am unable to offer my usual list of the best films of the previous year. I attribute this to a combination of poorer quality films in 2016 and the decline of Pittsburgh’s film culture.
The main factor in Pittsburgh’s decline is the financial distress of Pittsburgh Filmmakers. The Three Rivers Film Festival, which they sponsored, was dropped from its traditional 15 days to 9 days in 2015, and to 5 days in 2016. Management of the festival has been handed off to Film Pittsburgh, formerly JFilm, sponsors of the JFilm Festival, a showcase for films of Jewish interest. Meanwhile, the three theaters owned by Pittsburgh Filmmakers are scheduling fewer foreign and independent films. It’s not unusual to find them showing movies that are simultaneously playing at suburban shopping malls, presumably as a strategy to maximize revenue. The selection of films shown in Pittsburgh in 2016 was really not very different from those shown in rural areas of the country.
I’ve only seen three films that I considered worthy of inclusion in my Dirty Dozen. Two of them, Manchester By the Sea and Moonlight, are nominated for the Academy Award and are probably familiar to most of you. The third was my frontrunner for film of the year.
The Measure of a Man (La loi du marche) is a 2015 French film which had a limited release in this country last Spring. Vincent Lindon plays a 50-something factory worker who loses his job. The first half of the film follows him through the many humiliations of his long job search. When he finally gets a position, it turns out to be one of the worst possible–as a security worker in a big box store who is required not only to apprehend shoplifters, but also to inform on his fellow employees. The film portrays conditions among Europe’s working class which are unfortunately becoming similar to those in this country.
I don’t approach this article with the same enthusiasm I’ve felt in previous years. Untreatable problems with my right eye have taken some of the enjoyment out of moviegoing, and have left me more dependent on dialogue rather than cinematography.
The list is limited to those films I’ve had a chance to see. As usual, the better ones are crowded together at year’s end, and many of them don’t open in Pittsburgh until January or February. This year, in order to meet my self-imposed deadline, I’ve had to choose without seeing 45 Years or Son of Saul. I also regret having missed Clouds of Sils Maria and In Jackson Heights (which played here for a grand total of five days).
Here are my top twelve in alphabetical order. They are American unless otherwise noted.
The Assassin (Taiwan). My choice for best film of the year is this dramatization of a Chinese folk tale about an expertly trained swordswoman sent home to kill the man she once expected to marry. Much more than a martial arts film, it has some of the more beautiful shot compositions you’ll see for a long time. People who know about life in 9th century China were impressed with director Hou Hsaio-hsien’s attention to detail. Hou is easily my choice for Best Director.
The Big Short. This film is a bit like an economics lecture, but I give it credit for teaching us things that we all should know in a reasonably painless way. You must see this film before you vote in the Democratic presidential primary.
Experimenter and The Stanford Prison Experiment. 2015 has been an embarrassment of riches for social psychologists—not one but two serious attempts to portray two of our more famous (some would say “notorious”) experiments. (Please see my separate review of these two films.) Too bad not very many people had a chance to see them.
The Gift. This one also flew under the radar. It’s a creepy little story written, directed and co-starring Australian actor Joel Edgerton as an old high school acquaintance who shows up on a couple’s doorstep bearing gifts.
The Hateful Eight. Although this is not Quentin Tarantino’s best, it’s still a terrific way to spend three hours. Another wonderful score from Ennio Morricone; let’s hope he finally wins an Oscar. Here’s a sample from the soundtrack.
Labyrinth of Lies and Phoenix (Germany). The Germans continue to relive World War II and its aftermath. The first film, whose title actually translates as “labyrinth of silence,” is the true story of a prosecutor’s investigation of what happened at Auschwitz. Phoenix is a fictional tale of a Jewish woman disfigured in the war who tries to locate the ex-husband who betrayed her.
The Revenant. I don’t think this film should be sweeping all the awards, but it’s certainly worth seeing.
The Salvation (Denmark). Mads Mikkelson stars in this western of the “revenge-for-a-slaughtered-family” sub-genre filmed in South Africa. It has the kinds of beautiful scenery and quirky plot devices that made spaghetti westerns so entertaining.
Spotlight. This would be my choice from among the Academy Award nominees. It’s nice to see a film about not a lone individual, but a group of professionals working cooperatively toward a the common goal of exposing Catholic church hypocrisy.
Wild Tales (Argentina). An anthology of six bizarre short stories, this film plays like an adult version of The Twilight Zone.
Here are some honorable mentions. Despite Will Smith’s fine performance, I can’t put Concussion in my top twelve, knowing that Sony censored—deleted or changed—some scenes in order to appease the NFL. (Ironically, the trailer features Smith, as Dr. Bennet Omalu, demanding that the NFL “tell the truth!”) As a long-time fan of the Mad Max series, I regret that Mad Max: Fury Road has far too many computer-generated effects and does not tell as interesting a story as George Miller’s previous three Maxes. Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies was a lot better than I expected, and I’ll be rooting for Mark Rylance to win the Best Supporting Actor award. (“Will it help?” Probably not.) Movie fans will want to catch Hitchcock/Truffaut, in which director Kent Jones illustrates Francois Truffaut’s book-length interview of Alfred Hitchcock by showing many of the scenes they deconstructed.
One of the better films I saw in 2015 is one that I missed in 2014, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s Belgian film, Two Days, One Night, for which Marion Cotillard was nominated as Best Actress. Without ever mentioning politics, it vividly dramatizes one of the tragic human consequences of predatory capitalism—specifically, the ability of a ruthless management to divide and conquer nonunionized workers.
My choice for Best Actress of 2015 is Shu Qi for her subtle performance as the title character of The Assassin. No one really stands out as Best Actor, so I’ll do something I ordinarily dislike and choose Samuel Leroy Jackson of The Hateful Eight as a cumulative reward for his performances in five Tarantino films. (You only count four? Did you miss his brief appearance as the piano player in Kill Bill, Part 2?)
For the first time, not one but two filmmakers have made serious attempts to portray research in social psychology. Experimenter, written and directed by Michael Almereyda, is about Stanley Milgram’s 1961-62 obedience studies, and The Stanford Prison Experiment, written by Tim Talbott and directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez, recreates Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 prison simulation. Please take a moment and read these two blog posts (Milgram here and Zimbardo here) which I wrote before I saw the films. They contain background information about the studies and the official trailers of the two films.
There are important similarities between these two research programs. Both support situationism, the school of psychology which claims that human behavior is largely determined by its immediate social environment rather than by personal qualities of the behaving individual. Both Milgram and Zimbardo have suggested that their research can help to explain wartime atrocities such as the torture of prisoners and the mass killings of the Holocaust. The dramatic behavioral changes that occurred in these experiments are surprising to most people, and the studies are sometimes summarily rejected for this reason. Both studies were controversial, with critics maintaining that it was unethical to subject unwitting volunteers to the psychological stress that they generated. Neither would be allowed by today’s institutional review boards. They represent, for some of us, a distant golden age when social psychology dealt with more important social questions. (Finally, in an interesting coincidence, Stanley Milgram and Phil Zimbardo both graduated from James Monroe High School in the Bronx in 1950. They were acquaintances, but not close friends.)
There are also similarities between the films themselves. Both are independent productions obviously made on a shoestring budget. They both premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. To their credit, both filmmakers meticulously re-created the original experiments. Sasha Milgram, Stanley’s widow, was a consultant to Experimenter, and Phil Zimbardo played an active role in The Stanford Prison Experiment‘s production. Both films received favorable reviews but almost no nationwide distribution, and as a result they were financially unsuccessful. The Stanford Prison Experiment grossed $644,000 in its first three months, and Experimenter only $155,000 in two months. It will probably be a long time before we see another movie about one of those boring social psychologists.
In spite of these similarities, the films are quite different. The Stanford Prison Experiment attempts to portray the study as realistically as possible. Experimenter is more abstract, and is ultimately the more interesting of the two. For example, while both films show the researchers observing experimental participants from behind one-way mirrors, Almereyda seems to use mirrors as a metaphor to comment on social psychology as a profession.
The Stanford Prison Experiment covers the time from when the participants were recruited to their debriefing the day after the experiment ended. Most of the film, like the experiment itself, takes place in a small, enclosed space, with lots of in-your-face closeups. Alvarez’s intent seems to have been to induce claustrophobia, so viewers can share the experience of incarceration. Here is a scene in which one of the prisoners is placed in solitary confinement (a closet) for refusing to eat his sausages.
In spite of Zimbardo’s participation in the production, the film contains some none-too-subtle criticisms of him. As portrayed by Billy Crudup, he resembles the devil, a look that Zimbardo himself may have sought. Early in the experiment, he appears to incite the guards to behave more provocatively—a clear violation of research methodology. Although the guards were told that physical aggression was forbidden, he ignores a guard’s act of violence reported to him by his graduate assistants. Although he stops the experiment on the sixth day at the insistence of his girlfriend (later, wife) Christina Maslach, the film leads viewers to conclude that he was negligent in not ending it sooner. The filmmakers fail to dramatize his reasons for not discontinuing the study—his commitments to his graduate students, his department and university, and his funding sources, all of whom were expecting tangible results from all the time and effort that went into the study.
The first half hour of Experimenter is a realistic re-creation of the obedience experiments. Here is one of Milgram’s debriefings in which he first attempts to confront the participant with the ethical implications of his behavior, but then allows him to evade responsibility by showing him that the victim is unharmed.
Milgram is ambivalent toward his participants. His situationism makes him sympathetic to their plight, as illustrated by this quote from his book, Obedience to Authority.
Sitting back in one’s armchair, it is easy to condemn the actions of the obedient subjects. But those who condemn the subjects measure them against the standard of their own ability to formulate high-minded moral prescriptions. That is hardly a fair standard. Many of the subjects, at the level of stated opinion, feel quite a strongly as any of us about the moral requirement of refraining from action against a helpless victim. They, too, in general terms know what ought to be done and can state their values when the occasion arises. This has little, if anything, to do with their actual behavior under the pressure of circumstances.
Much of the rest of Experimenter reminded me of Thornton Wilder’s play, OurTown, in which the narrator speaks directly to the audience and introduces scenes some of which take place in front of deliberately artificial-looking sets. In Experimenter, Milgram (played by Peter Sarsgaard) is the narrator, and his narration tends to distance the audience from the events being depicted. Here is a scene of Stanley and Sasha (Winona Ryder) sitting in a fake car with a black-and-white photograph as background, reading a New York Times article about the obedience studies.
Some of the narration consists of recognizable paraphrases of statements from Milgram’s book and articles. They emphasize not only his intellectualism but also his sense of ironic detachment from his research. As portrayed by Almereyda, he applies this detachment to his personal life as well. Critics have debated the meaning of the elephant in the room. (I’m serious; there’s a real elephant there, and nobody notices.) Its first appearance seems to signifiy the Holocaust. The second time it wanders in, Milgram deadpans, “1984 was also the year in which I died.” He died of a heart attack in a hospital emergency room while Sasha filled out medical forms. Almereyda seems to suggest that he may have died because his wife was unwilling to disobey authority.
Experimenter covers the time from the obedience studies until Milgram’s death. This is a problem for Almereyda since Milgram’s greatest accomplishment occurred early in life. He notes that Milgram’s life was anti-climactic, but then so is the film. Much of it concerns other people’s reactions to the obedience studies, beginning with his failure to get tenure at Harvard, and including his frustrating experience with a TV play, The Tenth Level, that sensationalized his research.
Milgram was probably the most creative of all social psychologists. Some of his later contributions, such as the lost-letter technique and the small world problem (“six degrees of separation”), are presented clearly. Not so, his research on urban psychology. Although a couple of his demonstrations are shown, they are presented out of context. Milgram attributed many of the peculiarities of urban life to information overload, a point which could have been clarified by inserting a few sentences from his 1970 paper, “The Experience of Living in Cities.” His research on cyranoids was not included. These unpublished studies ask the question, “If someone secretly controlled what you said, would anyone notice?” Their omission was a missed opportunity for Almereyda, since you could argue that they illustrate what was, or should have been, one of the dominant themes of the film.
I hope my insider criticisms won’t discourage anyone from seeking out these two films. I strongly recommend them both, and I hope my colleagues in social psychology will encourage their students to learn from them.
Recommended reading:
Milgram, Stanley (1974). Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.
Blass, Thomas (2004). The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram.
Zimbardo, Philip G. (2000). The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.
2015 is a banner year for films about social psychology, although it may also demonstrate that such films are not readily marketable to a mass audience.
The Stanford Prison Experiment, directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez, depicts the 1971 study by Philip Zimbardo in which 24 male college students were randomly assigned to the roles of prisoners and guards in a simulated prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. The study, scheduled for two weeks, was discontinued after six days. It demonstrated that when people are given absolute power over others, they behave badly, endangering the mental health and physical safety of those in their charge. Zimbardo has noted similarities between the simulation and conditions in real prisons, as well as the behavior of American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
By coincidence, The Stanford Prison Experiment was shown at the Sundance Film Festival. Also shown at Sundance was Experimenter, an account of Stanley Milgram’s studies of obedience to authority. Not only are these the two best known examples of research in social psychology, they both have a similar message—that antisocial behavior that the public normally attributes to individual differences in personality is actually a predictable effect of the immediate social situation.
Phil Zimbardo served as a technical advisor to the film, supplying the filmmakers with videotapes of the experiment and other documentation. The film stands in contrast to the 2001 German film, Das Experiment, a fictional drama based on the Stanford prison experiment. At the time of its release, Zimbardo took strong exception to the way he and his study were portrayed. (There is also an obscure 2010 American film, The Experiment, with Adrien Brody and Forrest Whitaker, which is apparently a remake of Das Experiment. I haven’t seen it.)
The Stanford Prison Experiment escaped my notice until I read a favorable, but not enthusiastic, review by Max Nelson in Film Comment. Nelson praises it for its realism and its attention to details of the language and style of the period. He notes that the fact that it was almost all filmed on a single set gives it “tense, visceral power.” Given Zimbardo’s involvement in the production, he also makes two surprising claims. Zimbardo, he says, is portrayed by actor Billy Crudup as a “monomaniac.” He also says the film is “not entirely factual,” although he doesn’t explain why.
The film opened quietly on July 17 on only two screens and took in a disappointing $37,500 in its first weekend. It hasn’t been shown in Pittsburgh. No word yet on when it will be released on DVD.
As part of the advance publicity for the film, Phil Zimbardo did this half-hour interview with the Huffington Post. A good source of information about the Stanford Prison study and its real world applications is Zimbardo’s 2007 book The Lucifer Effect.
Frankenstein’s Monster (The Curse of Frankenstein, 1957)
Count Dracula (Dracula, 1958; Dracula—Prince of Darkness, 1966; Dracula Has Risen From the Grave, 1968; El Conde Dracula, 1970; Taste the Blood of Dracula, 1970; Scars of Dracula, 1970; Dracula, A.D. 1972, 1972; The Satanic Rites of Dracula, 1973)
Sir Henry Baskerville (The Hound of the Baskervilles, 1959)
Kharis (The Mummy, 1959)
Sherlock Holmes (Sherlock Holmes und das Halsband des Todes [Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace], 1962; Sherlock Holmes and the Leading Lady, 1991; Incident at Victoria Falls, 1992)
Kurt Menliff (La Frusta e il Corpo [The Whip and the Body], 1963)
Franklyn Marsh (Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors, 1964 [“The Disembodied Hand” episode])
Dr. Fu Manchu (The Face of Fu Manchu, 1965); The Brides of Fu Manchu, 1966; The Vengeance of Fu Manchu, 1967; The Blood of Fu Manchu, 1969; The Castle of Fu Manchu, 1969)
Rasputin (Rasputin—The Mad Monk, 1966)
Duc de Richeleau (The Devil Rides Out, 1968)
Mycroft Holmes (The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, 1970)
Dr. Charles Marlowe/Edward Blake, (I, Monster, 1971) [based on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde]
Lord Summerisle (The Wicker Man, 1973)
Rochefort (The Three Musketeers, 1973; The Four Musketeers—The Revenge of Milady, 1975; The Return of the Musketeers, 1989))
Scaramanga (The Man With the Golden Gun, 1974)
We don’t always get the kind of work we want, but we always have a choice of whether to do it with good grace or not.
Stanley Milgram’s studies of obedience to authority are among the most famous social psychology investigations yet conducted. They suggest that ordinary people are willing to harm others (to the point of killing them) on the orders of an authority figure who provides only minimal justification for doing so. What makes them so surprising is that they show that behavior we ordinarily attribute to strong personal convictions is largely under situational control–a basic argument of almost all social psychology.
A familiar pose: Peter Sarsgaard as Stanley Milgram
Experimenter, a new film about the life and work of Stanley Milgram directed by Michael Almereyda, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January. It has received good notices. Film critic Amy Taubin chose it as the festival’s best film. In the March-April Film Comment, she says:
Michael Almereyda’s Experimenter is a spare, formally ingenious biopic about Stanley Milgram, the Yale social psychology professor who in 1961 concocted an experiment that demonstrated that obedience to authority overruled morality and empathy in a large majority of his subjects. . . . Almereyda’s screenplay and direction—this is far and away his strongest, most coherent, and moving film—and Peter Sarsgaard and Winona Ryder’s performances as the titular experimenter and his wife capture the profound sense of irony that infused the Milgrams’ entire life.
Experimenter is scheduled for general release on October 16. Here is the trailer.
The only other film I know of that directly portrays social psychological research is the 2001 German film Das Experiment, a fictionalized version of Phil Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment, a study closely related to Milgram’s work. The film deviates considerably from real events, portraying the lead experimenter as unconcerned about the suffering of the participants and eventually morphing into a thriller about whether the subjects can escape from the laboratory. Zimbardo was not amused. Nevertheless, it’s worth checking out if you can find it.
The reason for the asterisk is the same as my reason for delaying this year’s list of best films. I can’t remember a year in which I’ve missed as many critically-acclaimed movies, through a combination of inattentiveness earlier in the year and bad weather during the end-of-year rush. Included among the unseen are American Sniper; Mr. Turner; Only Lovers Left Alive; Selma; Still Alice; The Theory of Everything; Two Days, One Night; and Under the Skin. I’m probably not going to see any of these films for a while, so I’ll go with what I have. On the plus side, thanks to Pittsburgh’s film festivals, I’ve managed to include some obscure but excellent films.
The Babadook (Australia). A literate haunted house movie and commentary on family dynamics. It’s good to have a horror film back in the dirty dozen.
Boyhood. You have to admire the risks director Richard Linklater took in shooting a film over 12 years. The consensus choice of film critics, it probably fell short during award season because of its lack of emotional highs and lows.
Citizenfour. There’s very little technique in this documentary. Laura Poitras simply pointed the camera at Edward Snowden and let Glenn Greenwald interview him. But this is an essential film about the willingness of an individual to stand up against illegal state action.
Confession of Murder (Korea). After the statute of limitations expires, a man confesses to murder and becomes an instant celebrity. The detective who conducted the original investigation searches for the truth. Koreans have made some great cop flicks.
The Dark Valley (Austria). Although it’s set in the snowy mountains of Austria in winter, the film has the plot structure and presentation of a revenge-themed spaghetti Western. Very entertaining genre film.
Human Capital (Italy). On the surface, a mystery involving a hit-and-run accident. The facts are filled in as the same events are told from the perspectives of three different characters. The subtext is social inequality in Italy; specifically, the question of how much a human life is worth.
Ida (Poland). As beautifully shot in black and white as any film I’ve seen lately, it has an intriguing premise: In 1962, a young orphan raised in a convent is about to take her vows when she discovers that she’s Jewish. But the ending, while probably realistic, was a major disappointment.
The Imitation Game (UK). My choice for best film of the year. The central irony is that Alan Turing, who saved the collective British derriere during WWII, was hounded to his death for being gay. Another great performance by Benedict Cumberbatch.
A Most Wanted Man. This film of a John Le Carre spy novel involving the hunt for a terrorist went almost unnoticed despite the excellent acting of Philip Seymour Hoffman as a German secret agent.
Nightcrawler. Not only does this action movie satirize the sleazy ethics of TV news, the main character (well-played by Jake Gyllenhaal) has internalized the ridiculous self-help messages taught by motivational speakers to naive business students.
Stranger by the Lake (France). In this thriller, a man thinks he may have witnessed a murder at a gay swimming place, but he lets his libido overrule his judgment and winds up in real danger. The film is sexually explicit.
Unforgiven (Japan). An extremely faithful remake of Clint Eastwood’s 1992 film, but the main characters are all samurai. The lead actor is exactly who you’d want in the Eastwood role–Ken Watanabe.
Here are two flawed honorable mentions.
Snowpiercer (Korea) has a terrific premise: Runaway global warming, followed by a failed attempt at geoengineering, leaves the survivors stranded on a moving train (“Snowpiercer”) in a below-freezing world. Living arrangements on the train replicate the extreme inequality that preceded the Apocalypse, and the film is about the on-train revolution that follows. Unfortunately, some plot points make little sense, and the film lapses into mindless violence.
Whiplash is a well-made, well-acted film with a great soundtrack, but is based on the flawed premise that the way to teach a young man to be a skilled jazz musician is to humiliate him, arousing both anger and fear. Reviews I’ve read suggest that many otherwise bright people accept this premise, which is not empirically supported.
My take on Birdman is that I agree that Alejandro Inarritu’s camera work is outstanding, but I had a hard time identifying with the self-indulgent pseudo-problems of actors under stress. This is one of the world’s most overpaid and underworked professions, so spare me, please.
My best actor is Benedict Cumberbatch for the second year in a row (last year, for The Fifth Estate). Best actress goes to Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, the beleaguered upper-class wife in Human Capital.
For the first time, I am unable to offer my usual list of the best films of the previous year. I attribute this to a combination of poorer quality films in 2016 and the decline of Pittsburgh’s film culture.
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