Whiplash is a 2014 film directed by Damien Chazelle starring Miles Teller and J.K. Simmons. The film is centered on a determined and driven first year Jazz student named Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller) and the experience he has being taught by a harsh conductor named Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons.)
The film starts out quietly enough after an opening scene involving drum practice. We get a general idea of Neiman's life; he's mostly a normal kid, but he has a drive and determination to be one of the "greats" of Jazz drumming. He's enrolled in a famous music school in New York known as Shaffer Conservatory to help better his skills, and it's his drive and determination that leads Terence Fletcher to eventually bring him into his personal band.
We get the idea from the first scene of the film and the couple that follow that Fletcher is a very precise and unforgiving teacher, but you don't really get an idea of how truly terrifying he is until the moment every member of his band frightfully stands in unison when he enters the classroom about twenty or so minutes into the film. I like when movies can use scenes like that effectively: It uses a few scenes to build what a character is like, then sets you in an environment that prepares the viewer for how unrestrained that character will be. The film is full on good visual cues, but the scene where he walks into the band room was one of my favorites.
Where Neiman has a drive, Fletcher sees that and is willing to use anything against him (including personal insults and throwing objects) in order to humiliate Neiman. The idea for Fletcher is that once he exposes his students to his cruelty and mockery, those students will want to push themselves and train harder to prove themselves. There's an understanding of Fletcher's viewpoint to be had, and there's a scene at one point in the movie where he quietly expresses his viewpoints on jazz and teaching people, but it's just as easy to see that what he's doing might push some people to the brink.
He's verbally trashing people in cruel ways and going as far as to use physical violence. He even looks intimidating, as he dresses himself all in black with shirt that shows off his muscles. He's not just verbally intimating, he's physically so, adding another layer of fear for his students. For him, this is just to drive his students to be beyond good. In Neiman's case, he pushes himself to distressing extents.
I won't go too far into what happens, but it becomes evident that it's not just about the music. It's about the morality of how far one should push someone as a teacher, and the film never really answers that question. We see perspectives on it, but it's through the characters talking to each other like people. There's no long rants about Jazz that's attempting to speak to the audience, and I respect the director for having the sense to include good dialogue that respects the audience. It lets the viewer decide on who was morally right, if anybody, and has no trouble portraying Neiman's character as insanely egotistical in parts of the movie. While Fletcher is far easier to identify as a potential villain, Neiman is hardly free of guilt. Or maybe he is, depending on how far you take what effects Fletcher's character has on him - but that's the beauty of ambiguity in movies like these.
While Simmon's character is probably the highlight of the film (he won so many awards for his role he probably has a closet specifically for them), the directing is top-notch. It has a very dim lighting throughout that owes very well to jazz, and the reaction shots are filmed well to music. It feels like you're in the film from Neiman's perspective, and the film never slows down because of it. When Fletcher isn't screaming his head off at every little mistake Neiman makes, Neiman is furiously practicing the drums to the point where he injures his hands. As a result, there are very few points to breath in this movie, and even those tend to be awkward or uncomfortable in some manner or another after the first fifteen minutes. The film is just constantly laced with tension.
Everything that happens in the film builds up to a third act. The third act is so phenomenal that it could've worked as a short film by itself without any of the context of the rest of the movie, but it's so much more special that you do have context to it. It's an intense final twenty or so minutes that I don't hesitate to call unforgettable. It's one of the best finales to any movie out there and does a rare job of utilizing all of the previous tension into the movie and adding it altogether for one final heart stopping finale.
Whiplash gets a 10/10. I'm not too sad over how overlooked this film was at award seasons outside of some specific categories since I believe this film will probably stand the test of time. I imagine it'll be remembered decades from now for all the detail and work that went into making a near-perfectly constructed film. I'd rank this behind Drive as my favorite film of the decade thus far.
After all the work and care that went into this film, I can't wait to see what Damien Chazelle has next, and I hope whatever it is is as masterful as this was.
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