Director: Damien Chazelle
Score: 9/10
When Good Art Isn’t Enjoyable Art
Let’s get one thing out of the way right now, spoilers aside: Whiplash is NOT an enjoyable movie to watch. It’s painful, and disturbing, and often causes you to flip-flop on exactly who you’re rooting for and sympathetic to across the course of the movie.
What is is, though, is fantastic art and brilliant visual storytelling.
For a first-time director, Damien Chazelle had one hell of a vision in his head when he wanted to make Whiplash. Originally an unfunded short film that swept Sundance in 2013, Chazelle got funding for a full-length version of the film almost overnight. He definitely got the right cast, too.
The story follows Andrew Neyman (Miles Teller) during his first year in a prestigious music college. The kid has chops, there’s no way to deny that. Teller did his own drumming for the film, and it’s some of the greatest musicality I’ve ever seen committed to a movie. He’s on the rise, and he thinks his break has arrived when he catches the eye of Fletcher (played by an unnervingly intense J.K. Simmons), a mad genius of a music teacher who leaves a trail of broken and disillusioned musicians in his wake as he searches for the next great among all greats.
Fletcher is abusive, tyrannical, manipulative, conniving, and just downright evil, to the point where you wonder why he ever got a teaching position at all—but then you see the results. You see how he can push people beyond the limits of what they ever thought they could achieve. You also see the sad and horrible results of what happens when the student can’t live up to his standards. J.K. Simmons said in interviews that the purpose of this film’s ending is "to inspire discussion and debate and not decide - are we happy for Andrew Neyman or are we lamenting his loss of humanity. The debate I love, is how far is too far? How much is too much? Is it worth it?”
This movie is brilliant, I can’t say that enough. It stormed into the Academy Awards, winning three categories when it wasn’t really considered a lock to even get more than one nomination. The directing is genius, and the scope of the film’s story encompasses every detail, from camera work (which is energetic and forceful) to the protagonist’s backstory (he idolizes Buddy Rich, which is a fairly significant foreshadowing) to the wardrobe (which actually has some major weight to it as a metaphor for the power struggles going on throughout the movie). The sound design is purposeful, mixing live drumhits alongside studio-track mastering of the music (which is stunning). Seriously, if you enjoy anything about music and the performance of music, you will be slack-jawed at that aspect, if nothing else. There has very likely never been another music film which hits you with such intensity and with such a ruthless dramatic edge as this.
When it’s all said and done, this is not an enjoyable movie. Every character is deep and well-rounded, sure, but no one is particularly sympathetic. If the writer/director hadn’t done such a good job at making the characters’ motivations and passions such integral parts of the characters, I’d most likely be ranting about how poor the movie is. What this movie is is a work to be studied; to be dissected and measured, and what we learn from that dissection is that this movie lives up to the hype.
Whiplash is fantastic art, and it deserves to be celebrated for it.
Acting: 9
Story: 7
Visuals: 8
Sound: 10
Enjoyment: 6
Overall Score: 9/10
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