The Agony and the Ecstasy!

Rating: 8/10 (28 February 2015)

One of the Army's better slogans was "Be All You Can Be." Many people incorrectly reinterpret that as "You can be anything you want." They think getting a perfect SAT Math score means you have what it takes to be a mathematician; running a 2:20 marathon as a male means you're a top notch runner; getting an A+ in a quantum mechanics course makes you a top flight physicist; or playing "La Campanella" on the piano fast and without error makes you a great piano player.
They are sadly mistaken, as this movie points out. The gap between being 99% and being 99.9999% is vaster than the gap between 50% and 99%. Interestingly, a lot of people who should know better, like the pompous reviewer at The New Yorker who dings "Whiplash" for technical inaccuracies, don't get it. Whiplash is not a Jazz documentary! It's a film about what it takes to be tops in your field. Being world class at something is a relentless selection process that starts with immense talent, and continues with extreme dedication and a good dose of luck. The food chain whittles down even a superior competitor when the time and place are not right. Again and again, there's only one chance, whether it's the future Nobel Prize winner who squeaked though her faculty interview, or in this movie, a nobody from NYC (our hero is called "Nieman," and "Niemand" with a "d" in German is nobody) makes it to the top through raw talent, bloody hard work, and a lot of lucky coincidences. The film is unapologetic about what we all know, or should know: a "good job" does not get you there, it's just the route to mediocrity.
The film reminded me a bit of the Michaelangelo tale "The Agony and the Ecstasy." That one faced off Charlton Heston against Rex Harrison as Pope Julius. But "Whiplash" is actually better, a rare find among modern films. The script plays the actors just right, from the young naiveté of Nieman to the relentless perfectionism of J. K. Simmons as the jazz teacher Fletcher, who is searching for that one world-class student so his teaching career is validated. Even in the little details, the movie gets it right: like the arrogance of a New Yorker stating that "some of the best from NYC, and therefore, the world" are on stage.
Along the way, Nieman shows that he is a naïve asshole. He dumps his fledgling girlfriend, anticipating her interference with his hoped-for future greatness. He gets duped by an attorney into accusing Fletcher of abuse, and actually believes that this is going to remain a secret to Fletcher. Talent is often a very narrow thing, and does not mean one has common sense. Picasso (and how many others!) have pointed that out. The climax is very satisfying as the teacher throws the pupil a loop at a live performance, and the pupil, now master, throws it right back at him, until these two birds of a feather give each other a knowing smile.
The only thing the film suffers from is a too relentlessly perfect plot, pulling all the right strings in all the right places, like a Ravel orchestration of Mussorgsky. The metaphorical trucks collide on time to cause career-ending whiplash, the metaphorical sheet music vanishes on cue for the inferior artist who actually needs it. It's like a giant clockwork orchestrated to get the maximum effect out of the 1 hour and 45 minutes. And yet, in the middle of the film the director lacks the courage to play the WHOLE of the title song just for once, fading instead into a "And the winner is..." These are nit-pickings in a great film that's fun to watch, and sends us all a reminder: When we think that "no matter what you do, someone always does it better, faster, more," that's true for most of us; but not for everyone.