Fake, fake, fake

Rating: Null/10 (19 March 2015)

My contrary reaction to the phony film WHIPLASH:
1. Fake jazz: Jazz is the vehicle to tell this story, but what we get is not jazz but rather the academic teaching of big band/orchestral music, emphasizing arrangements and perfecting the technique of one's instrument. Same film could have been better scripted about a classical symphony orchestra at a university. Jazz is about improvisation and the interplay between musicians, as seen in a small group context. Big bands as seen here are more evident nowadays at sporting events. The only solo was the hero's mediocre drum solo at film's end.
2. Fake theme/ending: Theme of the movie is the importance of motivation & rigor to promote excellence, in the context of a student, and the pitfalls of the martinet. In movies, for audience manipulation and dramatic purposes a theme is often betrayed at the end, most famous case being Alec Guinness's sudden reversal at the climax of THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI, because an audience expects the damn bridge to be blown up, even though his character spent the previous 2 hours with every fiber of his being symbolically building it. In WHIPLASH the finale contradicts everything previously in the script, not to be even-handed but to falsely convey a message that "maybe" true artistry and achievement stems from the horrible inspiration we've witnessed. Totally bogus and phony.
3. Fake characters: Given jazz's history, the two major characters - protagonist and antagonist, should have been Black. The filmmakers have every right to make them whatever they want, perhaps a female teacher and a girl drummer would have been interesting, but that also would not have fit the use of jazz as movie's central core. My reaction to the whitened-up story was the same reaction as I would have to a '50s movie biography of Fats Domino played by Pat Boone, whose early career was essentially spurred by the industry (and specifically his record label) customarily ripping of a Black artist (Fats) with a white artist (Pat) singing his songs for a general audience. Same crappy approach here.
4. Fake gimmicks: Many gimmick scenes in WHIPLASH would have been blue-penciled and not made it into the final script had this been a TV episode rather than an independent ("anything goes") feature film -the writers' room would not have permitted them to slip through. Most notable is the hero's car accident and arriving late and bloody to unsuccessfully try and perform at the big concert contest, when the band's other drummer was perfectly capable of going on in his stead. Not merely unbelievable but farcical as directed here. Final reel of him conned into appearing with no charts for songs he had never seen or heard before was an asinine gimmick, almost as stupid as him returning to suddenly lead the orchestra himself, all for fake-dramatic purposes. And maybe even worse the scene that made me want to leave the screening: his blow-off of his girl friend telling her his need to practice and succeed would not leave enough time for their relationship to continue. That must have looked bad on the page and it didn't play at all on the screen.
5. Fake performance: I have praised J.K. Simmons many times, and you can read my rave review for him on IMDb for his role in the obscure comedy NEW IN TOWN. But his facile, surface performance here is just the kind that wins awards (it surely did), but pales into comparison to many others playing essentially the same role. I will merely cite Robert Duvall in THE GREAT SANTINI or Lou Gossett Jr. in AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN as the most vivid in recent memory. I found his playing closer to the psychotic of Humphrey Bogart in THE CAINE MUTINY than to what the role called for.
6. Fake icon: Buddy Rich is elevated to god-like status in WHIPLASH, a reactionary and outdated concept that I reject entirely. In show biz history I would nominate Rich for iconic status as a jerk, not a musical artist. In jazz history, the logical icon and role model here would be Art Blakey, since not only is his importance in modern (post-WWII) jazz secure but more to the point he became the archetypal leader and inspiration to hundreds of musicians who graduated from his band, ranging from formative stints for Wayne Shorter and the Marsalis Bros. to little-known connections with artists as varied as Chick Corea and Chuck Mangione, both of whom I saw appear with Blakey's Jazz Messengers in Boston in 1966.. Unlike the teacher posited in WHIPLASH as a Dick Cheney-like nut, Blakey motivated rather than tortured his young acolytes. Buddy Rich and his mediocre '60s big bands yielded nothing, and as a drummer he was all technique and zero jazz.
7. Fake porn: Categorically WHIPLASH (the title is perhaps the key hint) is a type of soft-core pornography, among other things. It's another movie example of the trends in recent years to substitute sadomasochism for traditional sexual porn - namely the thousands of horror films about torture and sadism appealing to the audience to alternately identify with and then hiss the sadist as protagonist, or more recently the oncoming trend that will be inspired by the success of 50 SHADES OF GREY. The movie's domination theme is obvious, but the submission aspect is way more subtle -masked by the hero's natural rebelliousness. Looking beyond him we have a score of submissives -his fellow band mates who are humiliated (a key element of BDSM cinema) throughout the film. This as entertainment is the definition of pseudo-porn, acceptable to the masses because it does not involve "money shots" and explicit penetration making it soft-core rather than hardcore. The absence of sex in WHIPLASH is no different than the absence of actual sex in most BDSM exercises.
8. Fake setting: L.A. substituting for NYC = zero atmosphere.