[Editor’s Note: From time to time, our managing editor reviews a film. On this occasion, ‘Whiplash’ opens tonight, Nov. 14, at The Ross in Lincoln. Showtimes here.]
* * *
By age 25, Charlie Parker was credited with helping to invent bebop, an influential and experimental arm of American jazz. Ten years later, he was dead. You could make a great case for him being one of the most untamed, DIY, countercultural musicians of all time, pioneering a genre, busking for drug money, breaking new sonic ground and completely flaming out. You couldn’t make a case that Charlie Parker attended music school. He didn’t.
Part-mythology-commentary, part-double-talk, the dirty promise of Whiplash is that Parker’s drive, his performative hubris, his knack for innovation can be remolded or recreated through the rigors of academic training. That promise is seductive, seemingly incorrect, maybe aware of that fact, and wholly compelling. Damien Chazelle’s debut directorial effort is the story of a percussionist and an instructor at Shaffer Conservatory — cast here as the best music school in the nation — and the savagery of their ascension.
At the beginning of Andrew Neyman’s (Miles Teller) time at Shaffer, Studio Band director Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons) appears as a silhouette outside the opaque door of the entry level jazz band. Why Fletcher picks Neyman for a promotion to his ensemble, the layman’s ear probably won’t know. It’s a trail of breadcrumbs and strategic trickery that’s just-dormant beneath the surface of the whole movie. It’s not clear Neyman knows why he’s promoted either, but he’s told gruffly by Fletcher to join Studio Band at 6 a.m. the next morning. After oversleeping, he races to arrive. The psychological die is cast when director and ensemble show up promptly at 9 a.m.
As seen in the trailer, there’s a potential romantic interest for Neyman (Melissa Benoist) and a feeling of collegiate loneliness, but it’s much more about insulation, the loss of those more-grounded versions of the movie in the pursuit of something idiosyncratic and totally myopic. Peers, families and relationships are only present as tiny markers of how far down the rabbit hole its two main characters intend to go, how exquisitely they will depict obsession.
The most latent shock of Whiplash is Fletcher and Neyman’s shared idea of perfection and how it notably runs afoul of jazz’s improvisational, out-of-the-box qualities. Say, the kind that Yardbird would have championed every time he wet his reed. In his classroom, Fletcher is totalitarian. He asks players to begin with random measures, insulting and slapping Neyman for “not quite” following his tempo, which he gives with only a strikingly sudden 3-4 of his rippling arm, stretching a size-too-small black t-shirt. The one he wears like a cross between lingerie and body armor.
At the crux of the abuse, what Fletcher offers as its ultimate point, is a fable about Charlie Parker — that as a young saxophonist, Bird lost the beat while playing with drummer Jo Jones. The latter threw a cymbal at the former’s head. [Side note: whether this is true or not, as some have disputed, matters not even a little bit in a movie about what a pathological manipulator will say to get his way. “Hey, that lying character may have lied!” Stop it.]
In Fletcher’s version of events, this outburst was formative for Parker, who then doubled down on addictive levels of practicing, resulting in a career-making sax solo.
As Fletcher, J.K. Simmons is a less a revelation, and more like proving in a two-hour solo that Hollywood’s fifth chair trumpet player may actually be the best in the orchestra. He’s someone who’s long been a Phil Hartman of the dramatic world, a scene thief who felt at home in the completely unsteady timbre of all three Raimi Spiderman films; who outfoxed Hanks and Marlon Wayans in the Coen Brothers unappreciated The Ladykillers; who weirdly inspires trust in the Farmers Insurance commercials. Two decades of character acting is coming to bear in Whiplash, in the dark vein of a John Hawkes in Martha Marcy May Marlene, the bit-player who can carry a feature-length film if he’s given young and beautiful putty (your Elizabeth Olsen, your Miles Teller) to assault.
And while featuring very impressive takes from Teller, a lifelong drummer, the camera employs terrific over-the-cymbal shots, showing us the body’s manifestation of the the rhythms. It revels in how natural, unnatural and all-encompassing they have to be, as much about biting tongues and furrowing brows as speedy arms.
The 27-going-on-18 Teller looks like an unmarked, almost prepubescent De Niro, while the divots outlining Simmons’ mouth, the veins bulging from both his temples, are raging, like he was running into rehearsal minutes removed from cross-training each day. There’s a separate movie there, a more horrifying movie. Think about the the blank space in another well-done release this month, Nightcrawler, the iceberg below the water, what happens when the sociopath isn’t in public. In this case, it’s probably a monologue by a 50-something erudite Patrick Bateman-type who recites a well-rehearsed rationale for why he tortures people. And like a Dorian Gray, he comes out unscathed, even dubiously sleeker for it. [Aside: there were scenes like this that Chazelle apparently and wisely cut out.]
The bubble of studio band and the conservatory jazz competition circuit is a bubble of race and gender, as well. In the opening scene, Neyman is pulled from the heartful swing of a black instructor’s class. Unlike Fletcher, he’s not fixating on the tempo of a quintessentially black art form. No, he asks for more “sugar” on a line, for a more expressive kind of playing. Fletcher’s drill sergeant-ing is all for meter and tune, a militarized kind of playing that — like many of the worst parts of academia — seem only to exist within academia. It’s the violent expulsion of the soul from the music, even if there’s some new soul to the damage. The only woman musician who gets a second look in the movie is a saxophonist in the first ten minutes who can’t quite get out a lick, and Fletcher accuses her of sitting in her first chair on looks alone. There are no women in Studio Band. Having no idea whether this is unfortunately true to life, the film’s language on the subject is clear: to inflict the kind of psychological damage Fletcher does, he beats in heteronormative, masculine values, even if Fletcher himself can exude a clear paternal flirtiness with Neyman, some psychosexuality.
Experientially, the abuse is surprisingly not grating to watch. There’s a jazz to Simmons’ rebukes, as well. Volatile, but far from random. And zooming out: For 98 percent of people, all the times Fletcher chastises his band for a hair out of place will sound just fine. As an audience, most of us exist in some middle space between Neyman’s eagerness to impress and Fletcher’s trickery. Was that a good take? We don’t know. It’s like coming into a theater to watch Hoosiers, and instead watching Kobe Bryant berate rookies who were a quarter-inch out of position at practice. There’s real terror afoot, because we — like the victims — are very unsure when the outbursts will come and what form they’ll take.
In its chase of “greatness,” a lost, and maybe always misrepresented, kind of greatness, Whiplash feels poised to outwardly characterize internal forces. It’s possible that behind every great person, there is a monster, kicking them forward when they can’t walk anymore, when their blisters are bleeding again.
Charlie Parker’s Terence Fletcher may have been poverty. It may well have been growing up black in Missouri in the 1930s, or his absentee father. To recreate that in an institutional setting is a Frankenstein’s monster of manipulation: the feeling that if you actually encounter your shadow in another person’s body, they could ruin you years before Carnegie Hall.