Whiplash [Review by Haus]

I put off seeing Whiplash for a shamefully long time, probably because I’m not super into drumming and I’ve seen a lot of Miles Teller stuff recently. Bad move. Great film. Here’s why.

First, this isn’t a movie about drumming. It’s a story about dedication to perfection for its own sake, about a teacher and student pushing one another beyond all reasonable limits. It’s at once a condemnation of abuse and coercion in teaching and a celebration of its unrivaled power to drive students to excel. How hard should we be pushed? How much can one person take? And if nineteen kids are beaten and cast aside as tattered emotional pancakes to forge one gleaming Mozart, has some higher artistic balance in fact been struck?

Miles Teller plays Andrew Neyman, a young drummer at a prestigious New York music conservatory who, like everyone there, lives in awe (and terror) of Terence Fletcher (J. K. Simmons). Fletcher is abusive, supremely confident, probably a genius, and to say he doesn’t suffer fools is an awful understatement. His handpicked team of musicians play absolutely perfectly or they’re savagely berated, humiliated, and promptly axed. They snap to attention when he enters, eyes locked on him. Fletcher holds his team to impossibly high standards, and the abuse he doles out for he slightest transgression would make a drill sergeant blush. (And grab a notebook.)

Neyman earns a spot on this squad, where he’s soon subjected to some of the more extreme on-screen abuse I’ve seen (and some of the most hilarious — Fletcher’s withering quips and elephant-gun takedowns had the audience in stitches at times). He dedicates himself entirely to becoming a legendary drummer. But ultimately Fletcher’s approval proves punishing to earn, maddeningly arbitrary, and impossible to keep. Neyman is pushed to the edge in every sense, and what follows between the two plays like Orson Welles gassed up on three ribeyes and a liter of dime-store whisky going on a tear in some backroads Burbank motel room. Hurricane Orson.

A great film like this can pass for a study in a lot of things, not least of which here being the mechanics of dominance and control. Fletcher rations his approval like a studied abuser and with all the whimsy of a grade-A narcissist. What’s funny is that so many of us respond to this — we fall silent, fall in line. It’s how dictators are able to do what they do. (What? So I get my social commentary at Orson’s dime store.)

Questions persist, of course. Was Fletcher really demolishing students all these years just to find the next Great Thing… forcing quivering expendables through the sharp steel mesh of his judgment in hopes of one day spotting a diamond? Or is this just the convenient excuse of a pathological megalomaniac? But that ending…

See Whiplash, please, and not just because it’s on the Oscar list. See it because it’s one of the best films of the year. Written and directed by Damien Chazelle, this is a spare, striking picture that in its first three minutes cuts straight to bone and never lets up. The performances are tight and high-strung; Teller quite literally leaves it all on his drum kit, and Simmons’s taskmaster is among the most memorable film characters in recent memory. The tension is amazing. Yes. In a movie about drums.

Haus Verdict: An incredible film and my new pick for best picture.