Directed by: Damien Chazelle
Written by: Damien Chazelle
Release date: Released
Shaffer Conservatory of Music’s jazz professor Fletcher (J.K. Simmons) stumbles upon first-year Andrew’s feverish practicing. He’s impressed, but you can’t tell. He takes Andrew (Miles Teller) to join his top-tier band where he slings slurs, howls blown fuses, and tosses chairs. Andrew is in over his head.
Writer/director Damien Chazelle knows jazz rhythm. It’s in his hair-trigger camera, jumping from Andrew’s sweaty face to his blistered, bloody hands, to glistening double-timed hi-hats, to a scuffed snare, set to the hectic beat of the drums. It’s an energizing, loud, and unnerving way to show how all-consuming Andrew’s dedication is.
He doesn’t want to be great — he wants to be one of the greats. Saxophonist Charlie Parker didn’t have any friends until drummer Jo Jones threw a cymbal at him. Fletcher says it was the beginning of Parker’s greatness. This might be why he enthusiastically rebuffs his students, why he taunts Andrew’s mommy-left-when-I-was-young troubles, why he sacks an overweight student for kicks.
J.K. Simmons as Fletcher is a villain who cares deeply about music, about cultivating young musicians to be the best. The worst words anyone can hear, he says, is “good job.” He’s brutal, cruel, and merciless. But Simmons permits subtle moments of humanity. You hate Fletcher for the anxiety he causes Andrew, whose hardening soul is filled with obsessive rage over his talent. Simmons’ depth-defying performance is worth the accolades he has and will receive.
While hustling, bustling jazz numbers and deafening drums lend Chazelle’s hyper-dramatic Whiplash a Hitchcockian nerve, Teller and Simmons display lifelike, operatic characters you worry for and loathe. Whiplash is an agitating, flurrying film, something you can’t take your eyes off of (or your ears away from) until the final, whizzbang beat.
