Whiplash opens with a chance meeting in a practice room. In minutes, we learn all we really need to know about our players – or, rather, our combatants. On one side, Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller), a promising jazz drummer who can barely communicate beyond his kit. On the other, Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons), a brusque asshole who teaches at Andrew’s school, Shaffer Conservatory of Music. We can see Andrew’s admiration, his thirst; we can see Fletcher doesn’t give a shit about this kid with a terrible haircut. Cue 105 minutes of emotional and psychological warfare.
Whiplash lives for that warfare, physical and visceral. First-time feature director Damien Chazelle shoots the act of performance with close-up after close-up, emphasising the pounding and tapping and twisting and blowing and pressing. But Chazelle emphasises the physical in the same detailed way. Simmons’ bald head highlights every slight shift in Fletcher’s expression as if it was a minute change in tempo, and the camera gets as close to Andrew’s sweat, cuts and bloody blisters as it gets to the instruments.
So yeah, Chazelle’s not interested in the music. It doesn’t matter what the film gets wrong about a specific type of jazz because it’s not living in a world of jamming and exploring and laughing at Buddy Rich. Fletcher and Andrew live in a different, grotesque world, a world of drills and repetition and torture. That’s why Chazelle accentuates the physicality of performance: he’s blurring the line between person and instrument, dehumanising his players and scrubbing jazz standards of their personality. If Andrew or Fletcher have any love for their music, it evaporates when they’re around each other. They don’t exist for the freedom and innovation of true genius (the genius of someone like Charlie Parker, who keeps getting brought up); they exist for the soullessness and conservatism of technical ‘perfection’.
In my blog on Get On Up, I mentioned that the best music biopics use their form to communicate the experience of the artist and their art. Whiplash isn’t a biopic and it isn’t about geniuses, but it works because it largely follows that rule. Andrew and Fletcher experience music as a trial; to these hyper-perfectionists, a quarter-note drag can destroy everything. Whiplash reflects their attitudes in its unbearable intensity. Its big band performances, spectacular setpieces around which their relationship is built, are as white-knuckle as any final showdown in a well-choreographed action film, and its everyday conversations are as taut as a well-tied noose. Thanks to those close-ups and Tom Cross’ rat-a-tat editing, we hang on every scene waiting for-dreading-Andrew’s inevitable fuck-ups.
Miles Teller and J.K. Simmons are also instrumental (lol) to that pit-in-the-gut intensity. Simmons’ Fletcher has a violence in him; he’s predatory and duplicitous, playing the laidback mentor to lure young musicians into his den and tearing them to shreds once they’re inside. But Simmons’ real power comes from the conviction he gives Fletcher’s hateful rants and sadistic powerplays. Fletcher’s driven by the unwavering belief that he can breed genius, and Simmons makes it palpable through the distortions of the man’s black heart.
Then there’s Teller, whose transition from quiet, gawky teen to venomous pretender to the throne is sudden, and unnerving for it. Andrew parrots Fletcher’s sociopathic views on success like a child eager to please (and be) their idol. Teller throws himself into Andrew’s gnashing and snarling, but his performance is rich because, playing Simmons’ opposite, he captures Andrew’s lack of conviction. Andrew’s impressionable and malleable and desperately seeking validation, and Teller’s boyish voice, shitty haircut and Elmer Fudd stare really drive that home in the moments the boy spends adrift, without purpose.
If Whiplash is guilty of anything, it’s of a limited scope. It very rarely tries to be anything other than a strong psychological thriller, a depiction of a singularly diseased teacher-student relationship. When it does aim beyond that, it’s coy and simplistic – on Chazelle’s page, you’re either a tortured genius or an emotionally-healthy mediocrity, a player in a zero-sum game. It’s not as if it couldn’t go deeper, either. There are enough half-truths and self-serving lies in Whiplash’s script to indicate Chazelle knows what he’s writing: take, for example, the Charlie Parker anecdote Fletcher keeps wheeling out to justify his war on his students, a violent distortion of the truth of that immortal story. Chazelle’s refusal to correct his characters and explore the results of that correction hobbles the film, though, stopping it from getting really interesting.
All that said, Whiplash is ultimately two men on a stage, destroying each other, feeding off each other, surrounded by blackness. They don’t give a shit about music, only a twisted form of glory. Their eternal brawl commands attention, though.
This content is brought to you with funding assistance from New Zealand On Air.
