Powerful Drama, but Not Something Worth Recommending

Rating: 6/10 (25 October 2015)

Much has been written about Damien Chazelle's film with its powerful portrayal of a learner-educator relationship where the educator Fletcher (J. K. Simmons) goes to extreme lengths to establish mastery over his talented drummer learner Andrew (Miles Teller).
In terms of dramatic effect, the film communicates extraordinary power through the use of close-ups that show Fletcher's intensity, which becomes so intense that we might expect that he has some kind of masochistic sexual attraction towards his learner. This might be true; but the director's attitude towards the material remains frustratingly ambivalent. Are we meant to view Fletcher's behavior with a critical eye as an example of what happens when an educator becomes jealous of the talent of his learners and vents his frustration through conscious sadism? Or does the director have a kind of perverse attraction towards his central character - which helped J. K. Simmons win an award for his performance?
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the film's morality, I have to say that I found it offensive. Perhaps I am allowing too much of myself to permeate this review; but as someone involved in training educators of all disciplines, I think that the content offers a highly negative representation of educator power and how it can be so readily abused. Director Chazelle might defend his film using the famous Hitchcock dictum ("It's only a moooovie"), but the fact that it generated so much worldwide publicity attests to its power to generate viewer reaction.