In which the protagonist's task is more challenging than getting pictures of Spider-Man.
Director: Damien Chazelle
Writer: Damien Chazelle
Cast: Miles Teller, J. K. Simmons, Paul Reiser, Melissa Benoist
107 mins.
2014
When you're young, movies have a direct line into your soul. They're like a flu shot--sometimes shocking, sometimes painful, inserting themselves into your body and altering your nervous system. Whether a child enjoys a movie or hates it is not necessarily beholden to quality or craft. Sometimes the things that make or break viewing experiences for kids can be a familiar image, or a character who talks a certain way, or the fact that the main character has a cat. This is why children can so easily watch movies with a sense of wonder, or a sense of terror, or a sense of unlimited empathy. It's also why children sometimes attach themselves to complete dreck.
As we stuff more and more movies into our craw, that sense of wonder gets calloused. We grow harder to please. We recognize obvious sentiment as obvious sentiment; tropes and cliches finally register as we see them for the seventh or twentieth time. We acquire expectations. We watch movies with our third eye open and wary. We criticize.
I just now made up that opaque reference to a third eye so let me try to explain it. One eye open picks out colors and shapes. Two eyes open situate those shapes in three-dimensional space. It would make sense that having a third eye open would situate physical objects in a greater contextual fabric, a fourth dimension if you will. That which is seen becomes important within the tapestry of time--it becomes historical, cultural, social. That third eye is our critical awareness, our consciousness of meanings and implications.
All of this speculation is totally irrelevant to Whiplash, because all I want to say about it is this:
Whiplash is one of those now-rare movies in which all of the functional working parts were totally invisible to me as I watched. Normally our third eye detects aspects of film like performance, cinematography, production design, thematic structure, screenplay, etc., either to appreciate or to criticize. But then there are those movies that are so internally coherent, fully realized, and engaging that the third eye shuts itself and takes a goddamn rest for once, and the viewer is transported into the world of the movie and taken along for the ride just as when the viewer was a wee lad. This was that kind of movie for me.
Whiplash is not the most brilliant or insightful or revelatory movie of the year, but I'll be damned if I can level a single criticism against it. Every single piece of this movie is optimized toward the story it's telling. Fast pacing, merciless character arcs, confident cinematography, intense performance choices. These all combine to grip you so hard that you realize forty minutes after the fact that you've been clenching your butt the entire time. It's the real deal.
A lot of you might not have heard of this movie because it didn't get a particularly splashy advertising campaign, so it's about time I got around to summarizing it. Andrew Nieman (Miles Teller) is a first year at a prestigious music conservatory. He's a drummer, the first musician in his family, and he aspires to greatness. He knows without a doubt that the next rung in the ladder of success is acceptance into the school's premier award-winning band conducted by legendary hard-ass Fletcher (J. K. Simmons). Andrew works his hands until they bleed to get into this band, but once he does so, his personality and outlook harden along with his callouses. See, Fletcher will stop at nothing to bring out the greatness in Nieman. This includes emotional abuse, physical abuse... pretty much any kind of abuse you can think of. Fletcher instills a win-at-all-costs attitude in his protege that taints the boy's relationship with his father (Paul Reiser) and his girlfriend (Melissa Benoist). How far does the insanity go? Watch to find out!
Little is more pleasing than encountering a movie that absolutely knows what it's about. As the plot takes Andrew's attention away from his loved ones and focuses it intensely on music, it's as if a trap door opens up beneath the father and girlfriend to drop them right out of the screenplay. Andrew basically is the movie. As Andrew stops finding them important, so too does the film. This subtle choice becomes hilariously prominent in a scene about halfway through. Just as we're getting the idea that Andrew is going to grow emotionally distant as he focuses on his craft, because that's how these things happen... Andrew says exactly that, in crystal clear terms, to one of his loved ones. The scene is supremely effective because it takes the expected trope and eschews it with cold, unfeeling efficiency. Just as Andrew himself does with his loved ones. I'll say it again: this movie knows what it's about.
Whiplash is hard to talk about with the uninitiated because it so makes me want to dig into spoilerish specifics, so I'll just pick two more things to say.
J. K. Simmons is amazing. Miles Teller deserves his due for carrying this movie in a big way, and especially for holding his own against his frequent scene partner (also I just learned that he will be the new Reed Richards in The Fantastic Four??). But J. K. Simmons' work here is distilled, concentrated movie magic. His role is unthinkably intense. His very presence in a room can make the audience stop breathing a little bit. He is vile, villainous, boisterous, egregious--yet every time you think he might become a cartoonish antagonist, he has a moment or a monologue or a performance choice that humanizes him in such a clear and present way... even the monsters are human in this film. Simmons' work here is big and mean without being over-the-top. Like everything else in this movie, it is efficient, direct: exactly what is needed. My experience of Simmons has always been that of side characters who steal the show. In Whiplash the spotlight is trained on him, and he does not waste the opportunity.
One last thing. The music. Come for J. K., stay for the drumming. It's amazing. It weaves itself into the fabric of the film in a way that exceeds the percussion lifeblood of Birdman. Perhaps the best thematic argument for Fletcher's actions that the film provides is the music itself. I don't really know anything about music, to be honest. That may be part of why I so enjoy music in films--it's the mysterious ethereal sauce layered over more familiar forms of storytelling.
Anyway, I'm rambling again. The music culminates in one stupendous roller coaster of a final scene. So often films are engaging until they try to wrap a bow around their story. They go out with an unearned bang, or an earned whimper. Whiplash is the exception. The final scene is satisfying and right in so many ways, the kind of scene that will propel you out of the theater with your head in a fog.
Whiplash knows what it's about.
4 / 5 BLOBS
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