whiplash movie review guardian

Whiplash review – the Full Metal Jacket of jazz drumming

JK Simmons is thrillingly brutal as a pop-eyed drum teacher – but does this very watchable classroom drama have anything deep to impart? JK Simmons on Whiplash: ‘The whole macho thing never goes away’ How Whiplash kills the cheesy pupil-mentor genre stone-dead

I f Facebook’s Marc Zuckerberg took jazz drumming lessons from Dr Hannibal Lecter, the result might look like this. That’s the Dr Lecter, incidentally, who kills and eats a flautist in the Baltimore Philharmonic Orchestra for being out of tune.

Whiplash is a study in the misery and cruelty that’s always involved in teaching a musical instrument at the highest level: it’s outrageously watchable, very well acted, slightly preposterous, and nowhere near as desperately important as it thinks it is. Watching this film is like listening to a very extended, bravura jazz drum solo. You marvel at the flash, the crash, the technique – and finally wonder where exactly it is all going, and when and how it is going to end. Where does a teacher’s inspirational discipline and provocation cross the line into abuse? There is some thrilling classroom brutality and operatic dysfunction, though Whiplash perhaps jazz-drums itself into a bit of a corner. For me, it revived (happy) memories of testy Mr Shorofsky and frizzy-haired Bruno Martelli in Fame.

At the film’s centre is Mr Fletcher, a terrifying jazz teacher at a top New York academy; he is also the conductor of an elite student band, whose competition recitals are attended by the top talent scouts. Fletcher insists on the highest standards, and woe betide any student who lets him down by so much as a millimetre: he will berate and humiliate such a person like the drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket. Fletcher is played with bullish, pop-eyed belligerence by JK Simmons , wearing black jeans and black T-shirt of a style that was cool for youngsters in Fletcher’s own distant youth: weirdly, he looks like an ageing version of the gay teen hipster in Clueless. Writer-director Damien Chazelle shows how Fletcher’s music and his attitude embody from the outset a fundamental dissonance. You might think that jazz is all about freedom, relaxation and letting it all hang out. But oh no. Jazz is taught here with the same uncompromising formal severity as Bach, and Fletcher looks quite as messed up as Isabelle Huppert’s imperious Erika in Haneke’s The Piano Teacher.

He meets his match, or possibly his ideal pupil, in the form of Andrew, a would-be jazz drummer played with self-possession and flair by Miles Teller. Andrew has a closed, unresponsive expression, as if his whole being has been swallowed inward in concentration and absorption. He has an intense dedication to nurturing his own world-beating talent and status, which makes him emotionally vulnerable to attack. The film’s very first scene shows him hammering out a solo and something in it catches the ear of Fletcher, who capriciously interrupts this practice and instantly starts playing mind games with Andrew. His pupil-victim now has to master Hank Levy’s complex piece Whiplash, with its freaky 7/4 and 14/8 time signatures: the title acquires an awful additional significance. It is for him what Rachmaninoff’s third piano concerto was for David Helfgott. And all the time Fletcher challenges him, needles him, sets him up, knocks him down. Pushed to breaking point, Andrew never knows what to do. Is it a test? Should he defy him? Obey him? Which would win his respect?

JK Simmons is brilliant at Fletcher’s scariest rehearsal mannerism: demanding that an errant pupil stop playing immediately by raising his hand and clenching his fist, like a Roman emperor signalling for someone to be decapitated. The film’s nastiest scene has him doing just this because a student is playing out of tune: a misdemeanour punished in the most appalling and arbitrary way. He looks like he has everyone’s balls in his fist, and this is a very alpha-male drama, with just one female musician visible, casually and offensively accused of owing her position in the band to being cute. As for Andrew, he has other people in his life: his dad (Paul Reiser) and Nicole (Melissa Benoist), a girl at a neighbouring college that he asks out on a tentative date. But these relationships are entirely subordinate to his quasi-father and quasi-seducer: Fletcher.

We are entitled to wonder if Fletcher is supposed to be an out-and-out villain, but also if that ambivalence is intentional. Is Whiplash taking us on a narrative journey basically similar to that of Anne Hathaway and Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada? Well, Chazelle naturally allows you to suspect this, with dark revelations muted in the interests of keeping alive the positive dimension. There is arguably an unintended mismatch between the positive and negative interpretations of Fletcher’s behaviour, although also something heroic in the film’s final apparent attempt to resolve this tension musically. Concussion merges with percussion. It’s a film with impact.

JK Simmons on Whiplash: ‘The whole macho thing never goes away’

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Whiplash review: JK Simmons achieves a ferocious, barbed intensity

Damien chazelle, 106 mins, starring: miles teller, j.k simmons, melissa benoist, article bookmarked.

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After Whiplash won Best Supporting Actor, Best Editing and Best Sound at the Baftas last night, here's our review:

You don’t think of jazz drumming as a rigorous academic discipline - but that is how it is portrayed in writer-director Damien Chazelle’s riveting Oedipal drama Whiplash.

There is barely a whiff of cigarette smoke here and sex, drink and drugs - staples of most jazz based movies - seem off limits too. Instead, the drama largely plays out in rehearsal rooms in the basement of a prestigious conservatory. Chazelle’s achievement is to bring a ferocious, barbed intensity to a film that could easily have seemed a claustrophobic and austere chamber piece.

Miles Teller plays 19-year-old Andrew Neiman, a young, ambitious jazz drumming student at the Shaffer, an elite music school. Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons) is the school’s most ruthless teacher.

In Whiplash , the attitude toward music is akin to that toward dance in Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948). There is a famous scene in The Red Shoes in which the young ballerina (Moria Shearer) is asked why she wants to dance by the impresario Lermontov (Anton Walbrook.) “Why do you want to live?” she replies. This is an answer that would win Fletcher’s approval. He despises mere proficiency or “good work.” His philosophy is that to achieve true excellence, you have to practice, suffer, then practice more and drive yourself beyond the point of exhaustion.

Early in the film, we discover that one of Fletcher's best former students has committed suicide - just as the ballerina did in The Red Shoes . The teacher is upset but doesn’t feel any guilt. Fletcher makes frequent references to Charlie Parker, “Bird,” the legendary jazz saxophonist who died aged only 34. Parker’s early death is irrelevant. All that matters is the brilliance of the work - a brilliance, he claims, that Parker only achieved after a fellow musician threw a cymbal at his head when he was playing badly, humiliating him and thereby pushing him to better himself.

Fletcher is not interested in reason or “perspective,” which is what Andrew’s kindly but mediocre school teacher dad (Paul Reiser) likes to talk about. His job, as he sees it, is to use any means possible to push students to achieve more than is expected of them.

Chazelle makes music school seem like boot camp. Blood and sweat are spilled in fetishistic close ups as Fletcher roars at the young drummers to go “faster, faster.” He dresses all in black, which makes him look like a fascist torturer in a political thriller, trying to elicit the truth from a stubborn enemy spy. As soon as a student loses the tempo or plays a note out of tune, “rushes” or “drags,” he holds up his right hand - and everyone immediately stops playing as he harangues the unfortunate “squeaker” or yells at the “pansy-ass weeping and slobbering over my drum kit like a nine year old girl.”

The students behave to each other as if they’re on leave from Lord Of The Flies . They may be part of a band but there is no camaraderie between them.

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Whiplash could easily have seemed ridiculous. Fletcher’s abusive behaviour is for far beyond the pale that it is unthinkable either his students or the school authorities would tolerate it. Chazelle’s attitude toward creativity is romanticised. He peddles old clichés about the links between genius and suffering. The film portrays jazz musicians as strangely docile, compliant figures without the ability to improvise. The title itself (which refers both to a piece of music that is constantly played and to the car crash-like trauma that Fletcher’s students suffer) feels contrived.

What gives the film such a kick, in spite of its improbabilities, is its raw and brutal but also very subtle portrayal of the shifting, attritional relations between teacher and student, sorcerer and apprentice.

Andrew is desperate to win the approval of Fletcher. He yearns to be one of the “greats” but regards his teacher as the only arbiter whose opinion he can trust. Fletcher is endlessly cruel and sarcastic - and has a tremendous knack for vicious, expletive-filled put-downs. Andrew takes on Fletcher’s affectations the more time he spends with him. He even prepared to ditch his long-suffering girlfriend (Melissa Benoist), because she will get in the way of his career. As in all such Oedipal tales, the only way the student can emerge as a musician in his own right is by destroying the father figure.

The casting is crucial. With less sympathetic actors, Whiplash would have been difficult to endure. J.K. Simmons generally plays comic roles or kindly, genial types, for example the avuncular professor in recent Hugh Grant comedy, The Rewrite. Even here, the humanity flickers through. Andrew spies on him speaking to the tiny daughter of one of his old students with tenderness and humour. In another scene, he watches him play the piano in a nightclub. The teacher has a rapt expression on his face which makes his joy in the music obvious. The irony is that he is performing a schmaltzy number in an utterly unoriginal and banal way. He is certainly no “Bird” himself.

Miles Teller is an equally likeable screen presence who has played his share of laid-back romantic types in teen movies. You don’t expect him to portray such an obsessive figure as his jazz drummer here.

Chazelle leaves it up to us to decide whether this relationship between pupil and teacher is destructive or inspirational. Depending on your vantage point, the film either endorses the 10,000 hour theory written about by Malcolm Gladwell and others (the idea that genius is achieved by relentless practice) or demolishes it. What is clear is that in telling the story of the teacher and his pupil, Chazelle had driven himself to make a film that is dynamic, provocative and moving - and in which the emotional tempo never stops rising.

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“Whiplash” is cinematic adrenalin. In an era when so many films feel more refined by focus groups or marketing managers, it is a deeply personal and vibrantly alive drama. Damien Chazelle has taken a relatively staid subject like the relationship between a music student and his teacher and turned it into a thriller built on a brilliant undercurrent of social commentary about what it takes to make it in an increasingly competitive and cutthroat world. How far are you willing to push yourself to succeed? How far are you willing to push someone else to force them on the path to success? Carried by two electric performances, the tightest editing in a film this year and a daring screenplay that writes itself into a corner and then somehow finds an unexpected way out, “Whiplash” is as breathless as a drum solo, rising and falling just as the hopes and dreams of its protagonist climb and crash.

A young man named Andrew Neyman ( Miles Teller ) is practicing late at night at his New York music school, one of the best in the country, when his drumming catches the ear of the infamous Mr. Fletcher (J.K. Simmons), the most important teacher at the school and the conductor for its most important jazz band. Fletcher pauses, listens, barks a few orders at the young man, and moves on, seemingly dissatisfied with what he heard. Andrew had his chance, that one brief moment many of us have to impress the people who can change our lives, and he didn’t cut it. He goes back to his routine class band, telling his dad (a wonderfully genuine Paul Reiser ) that his opportunity to move up probably passed him by.

Of course, Fletcher’s dismissal of Andrew in that first scene is just the first of many examples of what could politely be called his “teaching style.” Fletcher likes to tell the apocryphal story of how Jo Jones threw a cymbal at Charlie Parker’s head one night when he messed up, thereby pushing him to the breaking point at which he became Bird. Without that cymbal, would music history be the same? Would Charlie Parker have gone home, refined, practiced and driven himself without the threat of not just failure but physical violence? Fletcher uses that kind of barbarous technique on his students: throwing furniture, calling Andrew names, playing mind games and physically torturing him with repetitive drum solos until he bleeds on the kit. But that blood feeds his musical passion. And Andrew blossoms, asking out the cute girl he’s been afraid to talk to before, and taking first chair in the most important band at the most important music school in the country.

Miles Teller, so great in breakthrough roles in “ Rabbit Hole ” and “ The Spectacular Now ,” does the best work of his young career here as Andrew, finding the perfect blend of insecurity and confidence that comes entangled in the core of a young talent. Andrew is naturally apprehensive, but he also knows he has a drive, a passion, a skill that is unique. Teller walks that line, never faltering by making Andrew too confident while also carefully letting viewers see the spark within that Fletcher fuels.

As for Simmons, Fletcher could have been such a caricature in the wrong actor’s hands. An over-the-top, abusive teacher is a part riddled with pitfalls. Simmons falls into none of them. He walks such a line that, even after the kind of inhumane mind games and physical abuse that should produce legal charges has unfolded on screen, we find ourselves drawn to Fletcher. He’s not 100% wrong when he says that the most dangerous two words in the English language are “good job.” Whether you think it’s the right approach or not, we’re in an era of praise, where encouragement is the teaching tool and every kid gets a medal for participation. Have true talents been left to wither because they were over-watered? Simmons perfectly captures the drive of a man who believes his abusive degree of pressure is the only way to produce a diamond.

While “Whiplash” would be a notable film purely for Teller and Simmons’ performances, it reaches a different level when one considers the execution of its tempo. Editor Tom Cross and cinematographer Sharone Meir often put us right on stage with Andrew and Fletcher, cutting and panning in rhythm with the beat of the drum. It is captivating, to say the least, particularly in a climax that produces more tension than any action film or thriller this year. The title refers to a song played multiple times throughout Chazelle’s film. It could also refer to that sense of wowed exhaustion you’ll feel when it’s over.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

• Melissa Benoist as Nicole
• J.K. Simmons as Terence Fletcher
• Austin Stowell as Ryan
• Paul Reiser as Jim
• Miles Teller as Andrew Neyman
• Damien Chazelle

Director of Photography

• Sharone Meir

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Whiplash is a horror film – so jazz critics should stop worrying

Researcher in Jazz and Visual Culture, Birmingham City University

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Nicolas Pillai does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Amid Golden Globe recognition and Oscar buzz, Damien Chazelle’s film about a young jazz student and his abusive teacher is pulling in viewers who would normally run screaming from the words “drum solo”. The exhilaration of the last ten minutes, a performance of Duke Ellington’s Caravan , has encouraged a new audience to investigate the jazz pantheon.

Despite this, there is a growing feeling in the jazz world that Whiplash is hurting the music. It’s been variously criticised for being joyless , for getting the music and its history wrong and for eliding the contribution of black jazz players . Some writers have been using “melodrama” as a dirty word.

But these criticisms miss something that the general public instinctively understand. Whiplash is not solely concerned with jazz. It is as much a study of alienation and abuse. And so its inheritance is not from jazz history – but from a sub-genre of expressionistic films about obsession and losing one’s humanity. Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes and Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull are the real antecedents of Whiplash.

In popular culture, jazz has usually been characterised by emphasis on the physicality of its performers. The heroes of the bebop era were immortalised by the chiaroscuro photography of Gjon Mili and Herman Leonard . But unlike previous jazz films such as ‘Round Midnight (1986) or Bird (1988), Whiplash largely avoids the modernist compositions of jazz photographers, which romanticise the creative process.

In contrast, young student Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller) is framed in confined surroundings, his movements dictated by the hands of the tyrannical conductor, Terence Fletcher (J K Simmons). The camera is entranced by Simmons’s large flat hands, circling them as they count in the band, cutting to them each time he halts the music with an angry fist. Neiman and Fletcher, pupil and master, become orbiting bodies, their relationship visualised in single shots that whip-pan between them.

Whiplash is also unusual for a film featuring jazz in that it does not glorify improvisation. Indeed, improvisation is irrelevant. For the young musicians of Shaffer Conservatory, success is a matter of fighting dirty in order to gain acceptance. Conforming to Fletcher’s demands is the devil’s bargain that may lead to a gig with the Lincoln Centre Orchestra.

A common trope of the musician biopic is the suggestion that talent is inherent. But in Whiplash, achievement is the result of agonising work, an incremental and painstaking mastery of discipline. I can’t bring to mind another film with as many shots of musical notation. Neiman’s success – if we can call it that – is pictured in visceral terms, in lingering close-ups of bodily fluids: blood, sweat and a single tear.

Traditionally in jazz films, the conductor or bandleader has represented commercial forces that restrain creativity. Simmons’s performance inverts this convention by making Terence Fletcher monstrous, a seething whipcord of hatred and humiliation.

The film delights in offering us glimpses into Fletcher’s interiority, only to snatch them away. Neiman unexpectedly finds Fletcher sitting in at a jazz club. Those large hands – so devastating when pointing, slapping, balling into a fist – tenderly pick out a piano solo. We are fooled for a moment into thinking that we have seen the “real” Fletcher. And then those big reptilian eyes slide over the room until they find Neiman.

In a critique of the film , The New Yorker’s Richard Brody suggests that it exposes its fraudulent jazz credentials by exalting (white) drummer Buddy Rich and by getting a Charlie Parker anecdote wrong.

Brody overlooks the film’s commentary on the role of myth and anecdote in jazz and the way that each generation appropriates these myths to their own end. Fletcher has even crafted his own fable of genius around a deceased former student of his, Sean Casey. Similarly, Fletcher’s unrelenting deluge of homophobic and racist insults, not to mention his casual sexism, vocalise a set of anxieties which have structured the Hollywood jazz film since its inception.

So Whiplash is not principally concerned with the dynamics of a jazz ensemble, or of connection with an audience. It is about the agony of the individual. At a family dinner, Neiman mocks the idea of team sports or of even having friends. Characters constantly wear earphones, isolated in their musical obsession. The film is bathed in a sickly orange-yellow, unsettling and unhinged. There is a consistent interest in textures seen in lingering close-up – the tension of a drumskin; the smoothness of a cymbal; the veins, scars and pores of our protagonists.

The film poster for Whiplash recalls Saul Bass’s work for Hitchcock and this is entirely appropriate. Audiences know what jazz critics do not – that this is a horror film. Look at the fire in Fletcher’s eyes during Neiman’s final solo and the expressionistic flickering of lights as the camera crash-zooms. This is the moment when one psychopath creates his successor.

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Anatomy of a Scene | ‘Whiplash’

The writer and director damien chazelle narrates a sequence from his film “whiplash,” featuring miles teller and j. k. simmons..

By A.O. Scott

• Oct. 9, 2014

The world worships excellence and runs on mediocrity. Most of us are fated to dwell in the fat middle of the bell curve, admiring and envying those who stake out territory in the higher realms of achievement. There is a wide gulf between doing your best at something and being the best at it, a discrepancy in expended effort and anticipated reward that is the subject of “Whiplash,” Damien Chazelle’s thrilling second feature.

This story of an ambitious young striver and his difficult mentor could easily have been a sports movie, and structurally, it resembles one. There are montages of grueling practice scattered among scenes of tense competition, all of it building toward a hugely suspenseful (but also, to some extent, never in doubt) championship game moment of reckoning. But Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller) is a jazz drummer rather than an athlete, enrolled at a highly selective Manhattan school (Juilliard in all but name) and under the sway of a charismatic and terrifying instructor, Fletcher (J. K. Simmons).

Movie Review: ‘Whiplash’

The times critic a. o. scott reviews “whiplash.”.

Fletcher has a first name, but nobody has the nerve to use it, and in classic drill sergeant or gym teacher fashion, he calls his students by their surnames, generally in the course of browbeating and humiliating them. Progressive pedagogical methods have not penetrated the room where his studio band practices, a virtually all-male preserve of sarcasm, sadism and enforced virtuosity. There is nowhere Andrew would rather be.

Mr. Chazelle, a 29-year-old natural-born filmmaker whose previous feature was the stylistically daring, hipster-cute musical romance “Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench,” has an aficionado’s ear for jazz and an offbeat sense of genre. He and the director of photography, Sharone Meir, give “Whiplash” the brooding, spooky look of a horror movie, turning the New York streets and the school hallways into a realm of deep, expressive shadows. There is an atmosphere of whispery menace, and Mr. Simmons prowls the screen with a vampire’s stealth and a killer’s wry half-smile. Fletcher is a seductive monster, swiveling from charm to nonchalance to violent rage with a snap of the fingers. The scariest words a studio band player will ever hear are “not quite my tempo.”

But Andrew eagerly signs up for Fletcher’s cult of perfection, though whether in the role of acolyte or human sacrifice remains in question for most of the movie. Andrew is not one for modest aspirations: He wants to vault beyond the masses of session guys and second-stringers into the pantheon, to keep company with Buddy Rich and Charlie Parker and the other giants of the art form. This makes him a bit insufferable, and Mr. Teller, adept at finding the ambiguous middle ground between self-confident nice guy and smug jerk, is not shy about demonstrating Andrew’s arrogance. (A recent interview in The New York Times suggests that he may share his character’s seriousness and self-confidence.)

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Culture | Film

Whiplash - film review: 'An extraordinarily taut and accomplished piece of work'

Whiplash, written and directed by 29-year-old whizzkid Damien Chazelle, won both the jury and the audience awards at last year’s Sundance Film Festival — and many more prizes have followed, with a Best Supporting Actor Golden Globe for J K Simmons, five Oscar nominations and five Bafta nominations, including Best Director and Best Original Screenplay for Chazelle. They are deserved. Whiplash is an extraordinarily taut, accomplished piece of work for a debut feature. It’s also unusual in having such a definite point to make — albeit perhaps a pretty objectionable one.

Miles Teller plays Andrew, a first-year student at a top music school in New York, the (fictional) Shaffer Conservatory, who specialises in jazz drumming. He soon catches the attention of the top teacher, the leader of the school’s concert band, Terence Fletcher (Simmons), an incredibly mean and foul-mouthed martinet, dedicated to getting the best out of his students at any cost.

Andrew wants above everything else to be a core member of the band, not just an “alternate” — but Fletcher is impossible to please. He repeatedly auditions his students in public on just one or two bars of music and then kicks them out for not being on his tempo. He slaps Andrew; he throws a chair at him; he insults him quite sadistically about his single-parent and Jewish family background.

Andrew just becomes ever more determined to succeed — a reaction made all too credible in Teller’s excellent performance (as an actor he clearly possesses this kind of dedication himself). Andrew practises until his hands bleed. He chucks his sweet girlfriend for being a distraction to the pursuit of greatness. He is so desperate not to be late for a competition concert that he risks his very life.

Simmons brings fantastic vim to his part, sinisterly clad in tight-fitting black clothes, bulging with muscle, his leathery reptilian face making everybody else look like putty as he shouts out abuse and threats. “We will stay here for as long as it takes until one of you faggots can play in time!” he shouts at the desperate drummers. Plus: “If you deliberately sabotage my band, I’ll fuck you like a pig.” And worse. He seems not just a tyrannical teacher but a borderline psychopath.

Justifying such an abusive approach to teaching, though, Fletcher tells the story of how the young Charlie Parker once played so badly at a jam session that the great drummer Jo Jones threw a cymbal at his head, nearly slicing it off — but then the humiliated Parker went home and practised so hard that a year later he played a solo that made jazz history. Fletcher’s mission is “to push people beyond what’s expected of them”. He says: “There are no two words in the English language more harmful than ‘good job’.”

Facing up to the pain, commitment and training required to win a race, or a boxing match, or to get into an elite military unit, is a familiar scenario in movies. Chazelle says he wanted “to make a movie about music that felt like a war movie or a gangster movie” (Whiplash has been smartly summarised as “Full Metal Jacket at Juillard”) and that’s what he’s done.

Although it’s hard to care much about physical injuries from drumsticks, the film pulls it off partly because this kind of drumming is so much about attack and subordination to the unit, rather than musicality in any wider sense. Here, indeed, the crucial test is presented as about sheer pace, Andrew seeing off his rivals through speed and strength.

Chazelle, an obsessive schoolboy drummer himself, has directed the film with fitting pace and precision, the edits all on the beat, propulsively moving forward. So many movies are set to furious drumming in any case — including Birdman and American Sniper among recent releases — that it seems an inevitability to have finally made drumming the actual subject. Moreover, Chazelle has cleverly extended the whole being-on-time conceit to the parts of the film that aren’t actually about playing and rehearsing — there are other ways of rushing and dragging.

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So Whiplash is surprisingly exciting even if you don’t like jazz, enjoyable even if you definitely dislike solo drumming. It’s really not about the music, in other words — at least until the end, when we finally get a protracted performance as the climax of the struggle between Andrew and Fletcher. This long sequence is meant as a fulfilment for both of them but it depends entirely on being moved by the music itself, and if you are allergic to this kind of jazz the film will lose you here.

As for that central thesis, that greatness is attained only by unremitting training, it’s certainly a refreshing proposition — so many pupils these days are warmly congratulated just for turning up. But is it true? In athletics, no doubt, but maybe the arts are a little more complicated? Inside Llewyn Davis and All Is By My Side are more reflective films about musicianship, but as a kind of infernal machine pounding through to its conclusion Whiplash takes some beating.

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In Theaters

• October 10, 2014
• Miles Teller as Andrew Neiman; J.K. Simmons as Terence Fletcher; Paul Reiser as Jim Neiman; Melissa Benoist as Nicole

Home Release Date

• February 24, 2015
• Damien Chazelle

Distributor

• Sony Pictures Classics

Positive Elements   |   Spiritual Elements   |   Sexual & Romantic Content   |   Violent Content   |   Crude or Profane Language   |   Drug & Alcohol Content   |   Other Noteworthy Elements   | Conclusion

Movie Review

“If you don’t have ability, you end up playing in a rock band.”

So says a poster in Andrew Neiman’s dorm room. The 19-year-old freshman at New York’s prestigious Shaffer Conservatory idolizes jazz drumming legends Buddy Rich and Jo Jones. He’s determined to follow in their footsteps, practicing so furiously, so continuously that his hands are often a bloody mess of ruptured blisters.

One such practice session attracts the attention of Terrence Fletcher, the formidable faculty member whose Darth Vader-like commitment to utter perfection for Shaffer’s jazz band has made him a legend … to be feared.

Soon Andrew’s battling two other drummers for the right to sit at the skins in upcoming competitions. But he struggles to know how to read Fletcher’s mercurial moods. One minute the master musician tells him, “Relax. Don’t worry about the notes, don’t worry about what the other guys are thinking. You’re here for a reason. … Have fun.” The next he spits, “You are a worthless, friendless, f-ggot piece of s—.”

Affirmation, Andrew learns painfully, is the exception, not the rule, when it comes to Fletcher’s emotionally, verbally and even physically abusive attempts to “help” his band’s musicians become the best that they can possibly be. As Whiplash (the title coming from a difficult jazz standard repeatedly played) careens through its stanzas, the question for the young jazz drummer quickly becomes whether he can survive Terrence Fletcher’s brutal tutelage long enough to reach his goals—and whether all that abuse is really worth it.

Positive Elements

On the most basic level, both Andrew and Fletcher have an Olympic-level commitment to musical excellence. Andrew’s determination to be a great drummer nearly matches Fletcher’s relentless, unyielding perfectionism. In an abstract way, that commitment is a good thing. But the movie can be seen as a cautionary tale of sorts, chronicling what happens to both of them when that kind of commitment to perfection morphs into an unhealthy obsession.

The cost is high. Early on, Andrew scraps a new dating relationship with a young woman named Nicole, telling her that he’s so committed to drumming there’ll be no room for them . Indeed, there’s now no room in Andrew’s life for anyone . [ Spoiler Warning ] But eventually it seems that he begins to see the error of his ways in this area, trying to rekindle things with Nicole. Fletcher, for his part, is fired after one of his former students commits suicide.

For all that, the film still raises some interesting questions about what’s necessary to achieve the kind of musical excellence we’ll all still be talking about generations later. “Truth is, I don’t think people understood what I was doing at Shaffer,” Fletcher tells Andrew late in the film. “I was there to push people beyond what was expected of them.” Regarding society’s acceptance of mediocrity, Fletcher says, “That to me is an absolute tragedy. But that’s what the world wants.” He goes on to say that the two most damaging words in the English language are the too-easily uttered good job, because they can keep people from pushing themselves to become the best they can be.

Serving as both a foil and as an advocate for an entirely different kind of life is Andrew’s kind, gentle and engaged father, Jim. He wants the best for his son, but he doesn’t want Andrew to have to submit to the kind of abusive punishment Fletcher continually metes out. We learn that Jim’s wife left the young family many years before; but it’s obvious Jim has remained deeply committed to helping and loving his son, even as he tries to temper the young man’s expectations about life and success. From the sidelines, Fletcher repeatedly mocks the older man’s mundane existence, seeing it as a failure. But this father’s tender commitment to his son is shown to be a good and beautiful thing—never mind that Fletcher believes Jim’s brand of love amounts to corrosive coddling.

Spiritual Elements

You could say that Andrew pursues drumming with something like religious fervor. And a lengthy drum solo at the end of the movie is so engrossing it begins to feel almost like an ecstatic expression of worship for him.

Sexual & Romantic Content

Fletcher repeatedly harasses band members with gay sexual slurs, frequently calling them “f-ggots.” In one case, he tells a male student to stop thinking about “your boyfriend’s d—,” using a sexual innuendo to communicate a musical instruction. He labels another drum player “Mr. Gay Pride,” and again unleashes a nasty sexual allusion (this one about manual stimulation) to make his rhythm-minded point. (And those aren’t the only verbal volleys that combine personal put-downs with sexual sleaze.) He tells a young woman that the only reason she’s first chair is because she’s hot. We see a couple kiss.

Violent Content

Andrew does indeed practice so hard and so long that his hands blister, break open and bleed. One scene involves him repeatedly trying to cover increasingly bigger wounds with Band-Aids. Another finds him soaking his bleeding hands in a clear container of ice water (which immediately clouds up with red). T-boned by another vehicle, Andrew climbs out of the wreckage, his face and hand covered with blood … then sprints several blocks to play in a competition. (He’s unable to finish when he drops a blood-covered drumstick.) Elsewhere, he falls painfully down a flight of stairs (onto his face).

When Fletcher tells him he’s done , Andrew attacks the teacher, triggering a brief melee. And Fletcher sometimes gets physically violent with his students, throwing chairs at them, kicking drums and, in one scene, repeatedly slapping Andrew’s face to try to teach him the rhythm of a song. A teary Fletcher tells the band he’s just learned that his best pupil ever was killed in a car accident. Later we learn he was lying; that the former student hanged himself, allegedly due to the depression and anxiety Fletcher’s methods pushed the young man into.

Crude or Profane Language

Fletcher can barely speak to his students without using the harshest of expletives. He even goes so far as using the outrageously offensive and derogatory c-word to address them at one point. And before the verbal abuse is over, we hear close to 100 f-words, two of which are combined with Jesus’ name, four or five paired with “mother,” and one or two used sexually. God’s name is abused about 10 times, three or four times with “d–n.” The s-word creeps in close to 20 times. A racial slur targets Jews; “f-ggot” is spit out several times, as are words like “c—s—er,” “d–k,” “pr–k” and “b–ch.” We hear “a–,” “h—,” “d–n” and “p—.”

Drug & Alcohol Content

Several scenes include wine and beer, both in family settings and at a jazz club.

Other Noteworthy Elements

I hinted at this earlier, but it really does deserve a bit more attention: Fletcher repeatedly takes deeply wounding personal shots at Andrew’s father, dismissing the earnest high school teacher as a loser, and mocking the fact that Andrew’s mother deserted her husband and child when Andrew was young. He doesn’t stop there, taunting and mocking all manner of people for being Jewish, Irish, gay, female, overweight, and utterly lacking (in his estimation) talent and drive. Related to his deeply misguided, manipulative, deceitful, and wholly narcissistic means and methods, Fletcher says of his desire to produce a jazz prodigy, “I never really had a Charlie Parker. But I tried. I actually f—ing tried, and I will never apologize for how I tried.”

Most of us have probably had someone—a teacher, a coach, a conductor—who pushed us harder than we’d ever pushed ourselves. At times it may have even seemed like that mentor’s “strategy for excellence” bordered on being abusive in some way. But in the end, perhaps we achieved something we never would have accomplished on our own.

First-time feature film director Damien Chazelle takes that experience and its corresponding question—what does it require to be the best we can be?—and blows it out maniacally and melodramatically in Whiplash . He imagines an instructor so dementedly committed to his perfectionist vision that there’s little abuse he won’t heap upon his students to get them to perform better.

In an interview with avclub.com , Chazelle described his instructions to J.K. Simmons (who plays Terrence Fletcher) in this way: “When your character screams, and you really go after someone, I want you to take it past what you think the normal limit would be. I want you to become nonhuman. I don’t want to see a human being onscreen anymore. I want to see a monster, a gargoyle, an animal.”

In a separate interview with The Wall Street Journal , he added, “I wanted him to be a great villain role and scare the s— out of you without ever using a gun or a knife. I wanted him to scare the s— out of you just by how he walks in the room, how he talks to you. And there are very few actors who can pull that off. He’s not playing a murderer or a terrorist. He’s playing a music teacher. That to me still makes me giddy.”

Simmons’ utterly, abusively over-the-top portrayal of a music mentor gone wild is a key reason Whiplash has been embraced as a critical darling, netting five Oscar nominations as well as racking up awards at various film festivals.

But it’s that same drastic depiction—filled with some of the harshest, most profane and demeaning personal attacks you don’t want to imagine—that ultimately undermines the serious, provocative questions Whiplash asks about pursuing excellence and how we all might be pushed toward it. Wherever the line is, we know that Fletcher is way, way over it.

And I can’t help but feeling the same way about the film itself.

Adam R. Holz

After serving as an associate editor at NavPress’ Discipleship Journal and consulting editor for Current Thoughts and Trends, Adam now oversees the editing and publishing of Plugged In’s reviews as the site’s director. He and his wife, Jennifer, have three children. In their free time, the Holzes enjoy playing games, a variety of musical instruments, swimming and … watching movies.

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WHIPLASH Review

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[ This is a re-post of my review from the 2014 Sundance Film Festival.  Whiplash opens today in limited release. ]

We know “greatness” demands sacrifice. It’s blood, sweat, and tears, and if you’re not willing to dish out all three constantly and consistently, then hey, you’re not worthy of your dream. Physical greatness--the greatness of athletes, for example--is easily quantifiable. But when that physicality is blended with musical expression, it becomes something more vague, complex, and fascinating. Writer-director Damien Chazelle ’s Whiplash provides an intense and disturbing exploration of the primal drive to dominate and achieve greatness but at a horrific cost. Anchored by extraordinary performances from lead actors Miles Teller and J.K. Simmons , Chazelle’s film never loses its brooding, unnerving energy even as it stumbles trying to find a fitting crescendo.

Andrew (Teller) is a freshman drum major at the prestigious Schaffer Conservatory of Music. He’s enamored with drumming legends like Charlie Parker, wants to be the best, and thinks he has a shot when he’s recruited into the school’s highly competitive jazz band, The Studio, led by the ruthless, abusive Terence Fletcher (Simmons). The impressionable student buys into the notion that only through Fletcher’s disturbing methods of breaking down students’ psyches can he achieve the same greatness as his idols. But as he moves towards greatness, Andrew’s emotional stability begins to shatter, and there may not be much left of him other than his blood on the skins.

Plenty of other films have explored the “cost of greatness”, but Chazelle hits into something fresh by putting it through the prism of percussion.  Music is a primal form of artistic expression.  We can create it through our bodies either by singing or by hitting. That’s not to diminish the effort and artistry of instruments, but most people can hit something. The drums are a violent instrument, so unlike a film such as Black Swan , which plays into the dichotomy of physical limits under the guise of grace, Whiplash is unrelentingly aggressive. Even in the moments where Fletcher isn’t on screen, his dark aura permeates the screen. We can feel it creeping in, and the drum sequences let it explode. Chazelle has us feel the low hum of potential energy before exploding it in a kinetic fury of Andrew’s blood and sweat showering his drum kit.

Chazelle adapted Whiplash from his award-winning short film of the same name, and with this feature he has quickly established himself as a director to watch. Whiplash is a work of bravura filmmaking as Chazelle furiously rushes around the music sequences, moving in time with the jazz. It’s a style of music that rides on an air of unpredictability yet it requires pristine technique, and Chazelle’s picture follows suit. Even when the story begins to falter, Chazelle keeps us hooked as he and cinematographer Sharone Meir shine harsh amber light on Andrew’s performances and make sure to almost always cloak Fletcher in partial darkness. The story may involve drums, jazz, and a music conservatory, but it carries all the dread of a finely crafted horror story.

But even with Chazelle’s tremendous direction, Whiplash wouldn’t be half as strong without Teller and Simmons. Like he did in The Spectacular Now , Teller excels at playing believable, broken teenagers; he finds the earnest, fragile center of his characters. But where in The Spectacular Now there was something tender, in Whiplash , the center is fearsome and dangerously close to madness. Every ounce of the character’s corruption, anger, vanity, and wrath feels natural, which is part of why the movie is so terrifying. The other part is Simmons, who absolutely dominates every frame of the picture. Fletcher is absolutely monstrous, but rather than chew the scenery, Simmons goes for the brutal punch rather than the flourishes. Even his mind-games lack pretensions, and we can see him sharpen every psychological knife and then mercilessly plunge it into his hapless students. The chemistry between Teller and Simmons is perfectly played as their sadomasochistic relationship escalates to where we see violence as not only inevitable, but almost a welcome release from the extreme psychological tension.

Ironically, that violent release only comes through banging the drums, which then creates a feedback loop to where catharsis becomes punishment. Any and all joy falls away, and we begin to have trouble grasping Andrew’s goals. Yes, he wants to achieve the same level of immortality as his idols, but where does musical expression fit into that? By the time the film starts to tap into that expression, it’s already started losing its way as it maneuvers through shortcuts and unnecessary subplots. Chazelle is trying to create a culmination of his themes, but the expression feels cacophonous instead of rousing.

There are plenty of interesting ideas banging around in Whiplash , but the story struggles to get them on tempo. However, Chazelle never loses the emotional drive of the picture, and the sense of dread permeates every scene. Even when the picture allows for a joke (usually Fletcher insulting one of his students), it’s further pushing us down into Andrew’s grotesque journey towards greatness. Every pause is prelude to a symbol crash, and every fill is a bridge to the next violent outburst. If music is an expression of the soul, Whiplash is the sound a twisted soul makes.

• Miles Teller

Whiplash Review

16 Jan 2015

106 minutes

Trying to make a thriller about jazz is like trying to make a horror about puppies; you are starting with a subject that inspires, in most people, the exact opposite of the emotion you’re going for. Yet Damien Chazelle has done it. With just one short and one feature on his imdb page, he has made a heart-thumping drama about percussion. He has made a sports movie with no sports, but plenty of balls.

In the tradition of great thrillers it has an ordinary man trying to best a much trickier foe, and like great sports movies it has a rookie intent on winning everything. It just finds those things in a place nobody usually looks. Andrew (Teller) is a talented, but cocky, drummer who wants to join the best band at his music college. The only way to do that is to catch and hold the eye of Fletcher (Simmons), the conductor/coach, who expects those on his team to meet his high standard or get the hell out. And why shouldn’t that be thrilling? Tension is just hoping for the best while expecting the worst. Chazelle yanks your heart into your throat waiting to see if a man will nail a drum roll, because he directs like everything’s at stake. In the music room his camera flashes around catching blood, sweat and tears. Andrew drums until his skin cracks open. Nothing is still. Nobody is settled. You’ll probably leave the cinema in need of a massage.

Taking nothing away from Teller’s all-in performance, this is Simmons’ film.He’s always been one of the best, but now, finally, a script has caught up with him. Fletcher’s a rumbling, black-clad storm of a man, ready to rain hell down on Andrew when he’s less than his best. And Simmons really relishes those moments, barking out lines like, “If you deliberately sabotage my band, I will fuck you like a pig". He’s terrifying, yet not really a villain. Chazelle keeps the roles shifting. Is Fletcher, who believes in rewarding greatness not effort, worse than Andrew, who believes wanting is the same as deserving? We never know for sure whether Andrew is as good as he believes he is. It pulls you in, tighter and tighter, by asking you to constantly see the other side.

Whiplash is so close to faultless that its one stumble is frustrating. Having kept its rhythms perfect for the entire first hour it bangs a bit too hard when Andrew reaches his breaking point, proffering up about five minutes that stretch the bounds of dramatic credibility. The film doesn’t need obvious melodrama because it’s shown how much you can make without it. But five minutes of self-indulgence and another 100 of ovation-worthy hits is a great ratio for any performance.

See our complete list of the best films of 2015

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