If you like jazz, you need to go see Whiplash. Whiplash is the
second feature from writer-director Damien Chazelle, who expanded the material
from his 2009 short film. It is one of
the most energetic, exciting, funny, and intense movies of the year. Rarely
these days do we get a music-themed movie that isn’t some heavy, boring biopic.
(Although some of them are quite good, it’s true.) Perhaps because Whiplash is fiction, it’s focused less
on prestige and more on capturing the intensity and the energy of music—jazz in
this case—as it’s experienced by a musician striving for greatness. Its central
character is a young drummer named Andrew (Miles Teller, whose very name sounds
like that of a great jazz musician), who is currently attending the fictitious
Shaffer Conservatory, the top music college in New York (and thus, the world).
His dream: to be known as one of the best, right up there with Miles Davis and
Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker.
Earlier this year Miles Teller gave a fine performance as a
mean, pissed-off teenager in director Gia Coppola’s lovely, heart-breaking film
adaptation of some James Franco stories, Palo
Alto. In Palo Alto Teller’s
character vented his anger by abusing other teens and living recklessly. We
rarely saw any vulnerability in him, but we knew from the look of anger
tempered by anguish on Teller’s face that he was hurting. In Whiplash
there is more of that vulnerability, mixed with a kind of unbridled obsession.
Miles Teller, who looks like a young John Cusack, is very good.
Teller pours himself into the role of Andrew, and we vividly
experience the blood, sweat, and tears of being a musician, and of wanting to
be the best musician he can be (which still isn’t good enough). (The camera often cuts to his nasty bloody callouses or the sweat spraying the drum kit while Andrew rehearses in a claustrophobic little cell for hours on end.) At the
beginning of the movie, Andrew is plucked from the middling first-year jazz
band by the terrifying Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons, who's marvelously mean and hysterically funny), the conductor of the
best jazz band at Shaffer. (He’s like the musical genius version of the drill
sergeant in Full Metal Jacket.)
Fletcher woos his musicians with his charming, fatherly demeanor, and then in a
flash he berates them with a constant stream of profanity-laced verbal shish
kabobs, jabbing at their personal lives, their appearances, anything and
everything he can to make them feel very, very small. At one point in the film,
he humiliates a young man ostensibly because his instrument is out of tune. He
gets right in the young man’s face and screams, “Are you out of tune or not?”
The man—who is now a boy beneath all that screaming and belittling—is sent out
of the room with his tail between his legs, and then Fletcher reveals that the
guilty musician was someone else, but that not knowing one way or the other was
worse than actually being out of tune.
Under Terence Fletcher’s tutelage, no one is safe. Fletcher
doesn’t care about feelings or dignity or whether students stayed up all night
practicing or if they are going to be crushed under the weight of his insults,
or worse, destroyed by the destiny-altering pronouncements he makes. But
there’s a twisted yet valiant old-fashioned logic behind Fletcher’s often
abusive language: He’s looking for the musicians who will stop at nothing to
earn their place among the giants. Maybe there’s something inherently arrogant
about this, and maybe it’s the work of a sadistic bully who happens to be a
brilliant conductor with too much power in his hands. Terence Fletcher is the
professor you dread taking in college, but he may also be the one who pulls
something out of you that you didn’t know you had. (He may also drive you to
self-doubt and self-harm.)
One of the greatest strengths of Whiplash is its keen awareness of the complexity of human emotion
and intention. Neither of the main characters is completely good or bad. Andrew
isn’t the perfect golden boy who wins our unmitigated affection, even though we
do care about him and we do root for him. Our sympathy for Andrew is tempered
by the realization that he needs to be taken down a few notches because of his arrogance.
He’s from my generation—the generation that was told we were special and that
we could do anything. We’re also the generation that got a prize just for
showing up. Whiplash plays with that
tension, too. Andrew doesn’t really know how to deal with criticism, and
encountering it for the first time from Fletcher is like a five-year-old trying
to learn how to read with a copy of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Fletcher is from the “old school” of sucking
it up and not stopping until you’ve reached your goal. We can see the disdain
he has for modern civilization and the idea that worth and talent are assumed,
not earned. According to him, “the two most harmful words in the English
language, are ‘good job’.” He has a point.
Whiplash has one
major flaw. There are no strong female characters in it. This movie exists in a
self-made masculine world where women barely exist, and always only on the periphery.
The one female character we spend any length of time with is Andrew’s
girlfriend, Nicole, played by Melissa Benoist, who’s charming and real in the
few scenes we get with her. There’s a scene halfway through the movie where
Andrew breaks up with Nicole because, as he puts it: he’s too driven to be a
good boyfriend, she’ll come to resent his lack of attentiveness, he’ll come to
resent her for standing in his way, and they’d eventually break up anyway. Nicole
is justifiably hurt, but she’s also smart. “You’re right,” she says. “I should
not be dating you.” She gets up and walks away, and it’s probably the best
decision she’s ever made in her young life.
Andrew’s break-up speech is piercing and difficult to
stomach. It reveals his passion, his selflessness and his selfishness, all at
once. He is saving Nicole from some major heartbreak, if everything he’s told
her is really the truth. But it’s supremely shitty to assume your girlfriend
will stand in the way of your all-important drive to be the world’s next great
jazz drummer. It’s also proof that Whiplash
doesn’t understand women at all, which may be why Damien Chazelle doesn’t
include a single woman in the top jazz band at Shaffer. (I guess girls aren’t
allowed to be as good as Charlie Parker.) Andrew hides his selfishness behind a
kind of admirable faux-honesty, and it’s this condescending, patronizing
non-apology that makes Andrew very human in an unlikable way. It also makes
some of the shitty things that happen to Andrew seem less pitiful. It distances
us from him in a healthy way, so that we’re not unabashedly championing him
during his fantastic drum solo. We know Andrew is kind of a jerk, even though
he’s brilliant and in some ways a perfectly nice guy.
And about that drum solo. All I can say is, I wished my good
friend Ben, who’s no longer with us, had been there to see it with me. He was a
drummer, and I think he would have loved this movie. If you care about music,
see Whiplash. If you want to take your
kid to a good movie, and he or she is old enough to hear a lot of profane
outbursts from a scary music teacher, take your kid to see Whiplash. Kids need movies that are full of energy and wit and
complex emotions, and in this one they might actually learn something about the
thrilling and wonderful danger of wanting something bad enough.
(And remember that girls can play instruments too. And maybe
Damien Chazelle will remember to include girls in his next movie.)
With Paul Reiser (as Andrew’s dad), Austin Stowell, and
Jayson Blair.
