Miles Teller, J.K. Simmons
“WHIPLASH” My rating: B+
106 minutes | MPAA rating: R
Fletcher (J.K. Simmons) conducts the elite studio jazz band at New York City’s most prestigious conservatory of music. He’s a musician and educator, though you might be forgiven for mistaking him for a Marine drill instructor…or perhaps a serial killer.
Fletcher enters the rehearsal room with the swagger of a gunslinger flinging open swinging saloon doors. His students don’t make eye contact. They gaze at the floor or at their charts. Nobody wants to draw the alpha wolf’s reptilian stare.
But that won’t save them. Fletcher is routinely profane, insulting, and capable of reducing a young musician to sobs. He seems to take great pleasure in finding a victim at every rehearsal.
“Either you’re out of tune and deliberately sabotaging my band, or you don’t know you’re out of tune — and that’s worse.”
He’s smug, cruel and probably sexist, given his treatment of a woman player in a freshman ensemble: “You’re in first chair. Let’s see if it’s just because you’re cute.”
He punishes those who disappoint him not with pushups but with rehearsals that go on into the wee hours: “We will stay here as long as it takes for one of you faggots to play in time.”
Thing is, Fletcher knows his stuff. He can listen to a dozen musicians playing all at once and immediately pick out the instrument that’s just a bit sharp or flat. He has an uncanny ear and makes brilliant choices in material. Which is why his studio band cleans up at competitions year after year.
Think “The Paper Chase’s” John Houseman on steroids. Or Bobby Knight with a conducting baton.
Watching Simmons (a terrific actor who played Juno’s father but is, ironically, known to most folks as the “professor” in the Farmers Insurance TV spots) sink his teeth into this impossibly meaty part is one of the great satisfactions of “Whiplash.” But he’s only half the equation.
Squaring off agains him is Miles Teller (of last year’s excellent “The Spectacular Now”) as new student Andrew Neiman, a drummer with dreams of musical greatness.
Andrew has a sweet face and puppy dog sad eyes, and he appears to be friendless. He devotes most his waking moments to practicing until his hands are blistered and bloody. When he isn’t clutching drumsticks he’s listening to the masters, especially the legendary drummer and bandleader Buddy Rich (a musical genius who was also an asshole — check out his rants against his players on the Internet).
So when Andrew is tapped by the legendary Fletcher to move up to the studio band — even if it means he spends most of his time turning pages of music for the first-chair drummer — he feels he is well and truly on his way.
He has no idea.
At first “Whiplash” — written and directed by Damien Chazell, who expanded his short film of the same title — looks like a lopsided affair. Simmons is such a seething cauldron of misanthropy that it seems impossible that Teller, as the quiet and deferential Andrew, could possibly hold his own.
Think again. The more we see of Andrew, the more it becomes clear that beneath that gentle facade is another snarling animal clawing its way to the top.
We get hints of how driven he is in his fierce practice sessions, where he plays the same drumroll for hours, gradually increasing and decreasing the speed. We cheer when the girl-shy Andrew strikes up a relationship with another student (Melissa Benoist of TV’s “Glee”), but then he drops her because any sort of attachment is a distraction from his single-minded quest.
And just when you think that Fletcher has triumphed, that he has weeded out the desperate Andrew as unworthy, the film turns into a fascinating Ping Pong match of revenge, humiliating retaliation, and ultimate triumph.
Chazell perfectly captures the aura of competitiveness and seediness at a top-range conservatory (love the well-worn wood floors and the blue-ish flourescent glow), and the film’s musical passages are killer (Teller appears to be doing his own drumming…if so, he may be an even better percussionist than actor).
| Robert W. Butler
Totally agree with the review…but not the rating; it is too low.
There is nothing which separates this movie from other top tier films. The acting is excellent (Simmons well on his way to Best Supporting Actor), the music (at least to my untrained ear) is superb, the duel between the two protagonists is unmatched in its muted ferocity — played out on the worn, wooden floors of the practice studio and the darkness of the performance stage.
The cinematography is masterful — it does not give us the urban noir/chic that we might expect, rather it contains us, confines us within dingy corridors and bluely-lit classrooms. It wakes us, startles, and shakes us when it prowls the Studio… electric with fear, power, and possibility. And when we arrive at Carnegie Hall, the camera makes that grandest stage microscopic: there is Fletcher and there is Andrew. There is darkness and light and sound. There — faces float as specters and goads, demons and angels…and in the furious onslaught, we do not know who is which as roles and meanings change and evolve in that endless, explosive, crescendo of an ending.
Whiplash is the song, the title of the movie, and a description of the story. It is that violent acceleration and deceleration, again and again as each character (for there really are only 2 characters in the film) pushes and pulls the other to a place neither has been before…to a place neither would have recognized in a manner neither would have dreamed. Whiplash is the violent collision of truth & lies, of the apparent and the transcendent — all in a clenched fist, and the sound of a drum.
Not a perfect movie (few are)… too predictable in some spots, too over-the-top in others. But highly recommended.
I wanted to like this movie more than I did. Volcanic performance by Simmons (great actor, great performance) and good work from Teller but once the teacher/bully character is established the rest is variations on an abuse theme. And the abused becomes an abuser,,,-ish…until he goes back for more. Too many clichés, and the ending doesn’t satisfy. I was ready for the music and the movie to end.