Driven To Extremes

Rating: 9/10 (2 December 2019)

Trying to be the best at anything can frequently come at a price for anybody famished enough to want to go for it. This is especially true when we talk about fame here in the United States, where it seems Vince Lombardi's mantra "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing" is something that is far too instilled in our culture. This is personified in the 2014 film WHIPLASH, the film that put its writer and director Damien Chazelle on the map in a big way.
Miles Teller portrays Andrew Neimann, an aspiring 19 year-old jazz drummer who has enrolled himself at New York's Shaffer Academy, where he comes to the attention of music instructor Terence Fletcher, portrayed by J.K. Simmons (who snagged a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role, and rightly so). To say that Simmons' teaching methods are unconventional would be a monumental understatement. Simmons' character Terence Fletcher is the musical conservatory equivalent of Lee Ermey's drill instructor in director Stanley Kubrick's 1987 Vietnam War classic FULL METAL JACKET, a man who is more than willing to push all of his students, but none more so than Teller, to their musical and even psychological extremes with a whole host of basically shouted scatological imprecations and more than a few choice four-letter words. Teller's own father (Paul Reiser), despite being proud of his son's dedication to the art of jazz drumming, fears for his son's own sanity under Simmons' near-psychotic dedication to the art of perfection, to the point where Teller's hands actually bleed onto the drum kit. Getting involved in a car crash (the same kind of incident that a previous student had while struggling to cope with Simmons' methodology, and which led him to hang himself), Teller finally goes to the authorities and finally gets Simmons 86ed from Shaffer...something that Simmons inevitably finds out about. But it is Teller who will have the last word.
Based to a large degree on the experiences Chazelle had had in his high school's band, which led him into filmmaking, WHIPLASH is an often-exhausting film to watch...and at times, deeply unsettling. Simmons, gets results by hurling the most demeaning insults imaginable at the students in general, and Teller in particular, because it is his belief that he can get the next Charlie Parker out of these guys, something that, by his own admission, he had never been able to do. To him, the two worst words any teacher can say to any student are "Good Job"; he'll accept nothing short of perfection, because to him Jazz is a dying musical genre in America. Chazelle, to his credit, even though he both wrote the screenplay and directed the film based on his short film of the same name, doesn't necessarily see perfection as a bad thing, but he doesn't exactly believe that Simmons' method of getting there is exactly a good thing either. Teller does a yeoman job of showing us how his character's dedication to perfection, having to somehow "please" a tyrant who is all but impossible to please even on the best of days, drives him almost to the brink of psychical exhaustion and even a psychological breakdown. It is not hard to put ourselves in Teller's shoes, because some of us have been in this position a time or two, with a character like Simmons here (and Ermey in FULL METAL JACKET).
But even with the experience of the first thirty minutes of Kubrick's great movie and Ermey's performance in there, the whole of WHIPLASH, with Simmons and Teller battling back and forth, is emotionally and psychologically draining, especially when compared to the carefree spirit of Chazelle's next film LA LA LAND, and the awe-inspiring FIRST MAN.
WHIPLASH is a extremely masterful character study. But be prepared for its emotional extremities