What if your mentor is also your biggest tormentor? Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash takes an intimate look at tough love, pain or whiplash that drives people towards perfection.
J. K. Simmons, nominated for Best Actor in a Supporting Role at the Oscars this year, plays the face of this ideology. And discipline. A taskmaster who will make your life a living hell till you give him what he wants. Nothing short of greatness. Simmons plays Terence Fletcher, the profanity-spewing offensive homophobic instructor — Full Metal Jacket ’s Sergeant Hartman reincarnate. He is wickedly despicable and doesn’t mind being loathed because be believes the end results justify his sadistic means of hitting a raw nerve. He mines for personal information about his students just so he can use it to abuse them.
Enough has been written about what a terrifying presence Simmons is in the film and that his performance alone merits the film a couple of viewings.
But somewhere in this praise for Simmons, the debate that the film tries to provoke has been sidelined. Do we need such slave-drivers? Are humans at some level animals that need physical (or mental) pain to motivate them towards a goal/destination? Or is it about what these drivers represent? Unpleasant, nasty criticism. An unforgiving evaluation of performance. A test of perseverance you need to crack to make it to the top of the heap. A filter that sets you apart from the mediocre majority.
Young filmmaker Damien Chazelle has set himself a very high standard here by trying to create the atmospherics of the military school in Full Metal Jacket in a music school of all places. Before Whiplash , a music school in our heads would have triggered images of peace-loving harmless musicians gently punching out tunes out of a piano or bespectacled geeks lost in their violins.
Whiplash is obviously not about the violins, it’s about the violence required to bring out the magic. It’s not about punching out tunes, it’s about not holding back the punches. And the filmmaker stages this volatile drama with explosive energy, composing every gorgeous shot in sync with the tune (the cuts are spectacular, on cue with every beat), never losing track of the tempo the film demands.
But for a slightly dramatic twist that’s out of character towards the end, this film is perfection. Sensory bliss. A rocking musical even if it’s more about the violence than the music. Spill blood. Glory will come.
