Shocking! Film about Stanley Milram's experiments

The Experimenter, Michael Almereyda's biopic about Stanley Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard) gives a great depiction of the controversial and disturbing experiments Milgram conducted at Yale in the early 60s: getting a subject to administer increasingly powerful electric shocks to another "subject" (who was part of Milgram's team) at the urging of a lab scientist. The first sequence of the film shows re-enacts one of the experiments, and it's as tense and disturbing a scene as you're likely to see. The surprise was that the vast majority of subjects were willing to administer near-lethal doses (or so they thought - in fact, of course, no shocks were administered), even when faced with howls of pain from the adjacent room. With that powerful beginning, the movie is off to a great start, and it's no wonder that it founders a bit from that point. To its credit, the film shows that Milgram's experiment was widely criticized; it brought him fame, but also notoriety. The drama of the film, however, is kind of tepid; an academic's life is rarely filled with excitement (pace A Beautiful Mind, Theory of Everything), and we don't exactly feel sorrow and pity for Milgram: sure, he was denied tenure at Harvard, but he landed a really great job at CUNY; sure, he didn't get full credit for the TV dramatization of his experiments, but how many social-psychology books are adapted anyway? His life, though cut short by a heart attack at 51, looks pretty good to me. I'm glad they took time with some of his other experiments as well, including the "degrees of separation" mailing experiment - who knew that was the same guy who did the electroshock experiment - one showing the depravity of mankind, the other our connectedness and proximity. Almereyda's script is at times whimsical and imaginative - with Sarsgaard often addressing the camera directly and commenting on his own work. Winona Ryder, who seems to be on a comeback trail (see Stranger Things) valiantly plays Milgram's devoted wife (an academic cliche but there you have it; see again A Beautiful Mind); the other secondary characters never seem to emerge.