Whiplash (2014)
Directed by Damien Chazelle
Under the direction of a ruthless instructor, a talented young drummer begins to pursue perfection at any cost, even his humanity.
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He susses out an out-of-tune band member by ridiculing his weight and calling him Elmer Fudd, a moment absolutely inspired by R. Lee Ermey’s iconic drill sergeant in “Full Metal Jacket.”
That's true about Damien Chazelle's Whiplash, mostly a good-looking reprise of the opening 20 minutes of Full Metal Jacket.
Pitched somewhere between The School of Rock and Full Metal Jacket (Full Metal Racket, perchance), this blisteringly told tale of an aspiring jazz drummer and his bullying mentor is a hugely entertaining, refreshingly subversive take on the well-worn "inspirational teacher" theme.
He attracts the attention of the terrifying conductor (an outstanding J.K. Simmons) of the school’s all-star jazz orchestra, who begins putting him through his blistering paces with a combination of verbal and physical abuse, hilarious sarcastic putdowns and many brutal homophobic “Full Metal Jacket”-style slurs that clearly stunned the politically ubercorrect audience at the Eccles theater.
Simmons is brilliant when he’s in full flow, blending the drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket with a more sinister line of emotional abuse, while Teller –with his natural charisma in buckets – provides a quiet, but insightful counterpoint.
Fletcher is a crackpot, the music equivalent of R. Lee Ermey’s drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket .
A toxic (but mordantly hilarious) combination of The Paper Chase ’s loftily condescending law professor and a trash-talking sports coach, Fletcher is the kind of unconventional pedagogue who thinks nothing of winging a chair at his pupil’s head when the tempo drags by a fraction of a beat, or punctuating tips on musical timekeeping with a series of brisk slaps to the face.
Think John Houseman in “The Paper Chase’’ with a touch of Jack Webb’s Marine drill sergeant in “The D.I.,’’ and you’ll get an idea of the extreme hazing and mind games from Simmons that push Teller toward the breaking point.
Chazelle pulls together disparate material we know — Fame, The Paper Chase, even Full Metal Jacket — and offers a fresh take on the familiar, rousing as Rocky was in its time.
Neither is it “The Paper Chase,” in which young and old come to an uneasy peace.
Chazelle (“Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench”) puts a wicked twist on the dedicated-teacher plot and combines it with elements that bring to mind boot-camp action fare and “Black Swan” and other Darren Aronofsky tales about people who pursue passions to the point of self-destruction.
(At times the intensity rivals Darren Aronofsky 's ballet nightmare, "Black Swan.")
Not since Black Swan has there been a movie that so successfully used its own myopic intensity as an artistic choice.
We’ve seen similar stories in the area of dance—whether in The Red Shoes or Black Swan—but Whiplash stays away from the heightened melodrama of those films, and its modesty gives the story a grounded, hard-edged quality.
Actual musicianship is pretty much nonexistent here, as the competitiveness is even fiercer than among the dancers in “Black Swan” or even “Showgirls.”
Chazelle clearly understands the intensely competitive world of music schools in general and jazz education in particular, but “Whiplash” is about jazz in almost exactly the same way that “Black Swan” is about ballet.
In Whiplash, the attitude toward music is akin to that toward dance in Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948).
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When he talks movingly of the death of a former brilliant pupil, we are reminded of the scene from Broadcast News in which William Hurt’s careerist news reporter is conveniently caught crying on camera.
At the risk of hyperbole, I'll say that Simmons' intensity, his raging command and sheer fearsomeness reminds me of nothing less than George C. Scott in Patton.
In his 2009 debut feature, Guy and Madeleine on a Park, characters burst into song — Chazelle also wrote the songs’ lyrics — as if in a Vincente Minnelli MGM musical or, given the black-and-white, spontaneous ambiance, Jean-Luc Godard’s New Wave lark A Woman Is a Woman.
This monomania is getting Simmons praise, in the same way that Ben Kingsley got praise for the repetitious, bald-headed hard-on he played in Sexy Beast.
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The film they watch: Jules Dassin’s classic heist thriller Rififi .
(If I’ve learned anything from Whiplash and the 1980 Fame, it’s that Performing Arts Schools in New York City are lit like the Corleone family living room.)