Damien Chazelle (2014)

When Best Supporting Actor and Actress awards were introduced by the Academy in 1937, and for some years after, those nominated in these categories were distinguished from lead acting contestants by their lesser celebrity as much as by the size of the role they’d played.  Of course, an actor’s star status greatly influenced how big a part s/he got.  Of course, it was possible for younger actors who came to notice in supporting roles to graduate to bigger ones:  Olivia de Havilland, for example, nominated as Best Supporting Actress for Gone with the Wind (1939), twice won the Best Actress Oscar during the next decade.   Nevertheless, the distinction persisted for well over twenty years.  In his review of the Academy Awards for the year 1961, Robert Osborne records that:

‘Rita Moreno and George Chakiris [both in West Side Story] won the supporting races, beating out Judy Garland and Montgomery Clift [both in Judgment at Nuremberg].  Many [Academy] voters had voiced disapproval that major stars – like Miss Garland and Clift – were allowed to compete for minor Oscars.’

Jonathan Kimble (J K) Simmons, who turned sixty earlier this month, has been, until now, a supporting actor of something like the old school.  (Though not quite the same creature:  television, on which Simmons is a well-known face, considerably complicates the issue.)  He has been appearing in cinema movies for twenty years.  In the last ten, he’s done fine work in small or very small parts in films such as Juno (2007), Burn After Reading (2008), I Love You, Man and Up in the Air (both 2009).  In the writer-director Damien Chazelle’s debut feature Whiplash[1], J K Simmons has what is technically the film’s second largest role but it’s the star part – and the performance is a star turn.  Simmons displays formidable control but he can hardly avoid communicating some of the excitement he must feel at getting an attention-getting opportunity like this, playing the tyrant jazz teacher-conductor Terrence Fletcher.  Simmons is sweeping the board for supporting actor prizes this awards season.  Even though the kind of acting he does in Whiplash is very different from what I’ve seen from  him previously, the respect and affection that he’s built through a body of quieter supporting work has probably given greater impetus to his awards charge.

Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller) wants to be not just a good jazz drummer but a great one – his hero is Buddy Rich.  Andrew gets a place at the (fictional, Juilliard-type) Shaffer Conservatory in New York City and fights to become the core drummer in the band run by Terrence Fletcher, who is, to put it mildly, lean and mean.  Often verbally and occasionally physically abusive, Fletcher pushes the boys in the band very hard (they are all male – the one girl who comes along for an early audition isn’t seen again).  He tells the students the story of how Jo Jones, a drummer in Count Basie’s band, once threw a cymbal at the head of the teenage Charlie Parker, who’d lost the beat of a number:  Fletcher suggests this incident was crucial in galvanising Parker’s talent.  Much later in the film, Andrew hears the same story again from Fletcher, who explains that he handed out rough treatment at Shaffer as a means of pushing the band members to achieve what they didn’t know they were capable of achieving.

By this point, both Fletcher and Andrew have left the Conservatory.  Fletcher, in the one moment when he sheds tears rather than reducing the jazz players to them, tells the band he’s upset because an ex-student, a boy who worked hard and who did realise his potential, has just died in a car crash.  This turns out to be untrue:  the alumnus concerned has committed suicide and his mother blames the depression from which her son had been suffering on Fletcher’s tutelage.  After Andrew, goaded by this perfectionist monster beyond endurance, has physically assaulted Fletcher – on stage, mid-performance, in front of a large audience – and been expelled from Shaffer as a result, a lawyer, representing the mother of the young suicide, persuades Andrew to spill the beans – anonymously – about Fletcher’s behaviour.  It’s thus thanks to Andrew that Fletcher also parts company with Shaffer.  After retelling the Charlie Parker story, Fletcher invites Andrew to take part in a festival concert at which another band that Fletcher conducts will be playing.   The Wikipedia plot synopsis describes the climax to the film very well:

‘On stage, Fletcher tells Andrew he knows he testified against him, and in revenge leads the band in a new piece Andrew was not given sheet music for. Andrew leaves the stage humiliated, but returns and begins playing ‘Caravan’, interrupting Fletcher as he addresses the audience. The rest of the band joins [Andrew], and Fletcher follows suit. Andrew ends the performance with an extravagant drum solo. Fletcher is at first angry, but gives a nod of approval to Andrew as he finishes.’

Whiplash is well named.  The fast cutting (by Tom Cross), the aggressive insistence of the sound mix and Damien Chazelle’s remarkable self-assurance create momentum immediately and sustain it thoroughly.  (The occasional silences are also important to the sound design, and effective.)  The film works in the way Chazelle probably wanted it to but it derives from well-worn clichés about artistic endeavour.  Chazelle reiterates that reaching the top of the tree, at least as an interpretative artist, requires blood, sweat and tears (all three literally in this case), perhaps even death – and monomaniacal obsession which will cut you off from personal relationships.  Not for the first time on the cinema screen, a slave-driving mentor’s outrageous behaviour eventually prompts rebellion on the part of an ambitious learner but the final outcome suggests that the pair have become kindred spirits:  the pupil finally earns the teacher’s respect by emulating the latter’s ruthless single-mindedness.  (Although the Svengali of Whiplash has to have a cultural flavour, he’s closely related to the boss- or instructor-from-hell familiar from different milieus.  The set-up here calls to mind An Officer and a Gentleman and The Devil Wears Prada, as much as other stories with a performing arts context.)

Damien Chazelle has said in interview[2] that Andrew Neiman’s situation and the character of Terrence Fletcher are inspired by his own experience of playing, in high school, in ‘ a very competitive jazz band that was modeled after professional bands’ and of ‘being very terrified’.  Chazelle says that he:

‘… wanted to pour that into the movie. And as for the actual portrait of the character, most of it is pulled from my teacher, but I certainly pushed it further. There’s a little bit of Buddy Rich in him, in terms of how he treats his players, and a little bit of other famously tyrannical band leaders in jazz history who would throw things at their players, and hit them, and yell at them, and scream at them. I was just interested in that tendency, particularly in big-band jazz. These authoritarian, dictatorial band leaders, and what that does to a musician.’

This illustrates how much Whiplash depends on a large improbability.  It’s not long since Chazelle was in high school (he’s only twenty-nine) but the idea that, in the litigious, ‘customer’-oriented North American higher education system of today, someone could get away with Terrence Fletcher’s behaviour – and it appears to have been going on for years – is ridiculous.  His language is profane, chauvinist, homophobic, racist.  After affably asking Andrew about his family background, he uses the information he gets to insult the boy’s parents in front of the other band members.  As well as throwing a chair at Andrew and hitting him, Fletcher displays contempt for his desperate efforts to please (and the similar efforts of Andrew’s competitors for a place in the band) – ‘Now, clean your blood off my drum set’, and so on.   Chazelle evidently wanted to fuse an educational setting with a crudely colourful idea of what the professional jazz world is like but the two are incompatible, for all that the spectacular finale is meant to demonstrate that Andrew has absorbed the parable of Charlie Parker.  One of the other students says to Andrew, early on, that Fletcher’s bark is worse than his bite; but it’s impossible to believe that all concerned could have such a relaxed attitude – or that what Fletcher does could remain unknown to, or be accepted by, members of staff or the Shaffer authorities.  (Not that there’s much evidence of either – one other teacher in a thirty-second cameo and no management.)  Nothing could have made me wish, during Whiplash, that I was watching Black Swan again instead but at least the world of Darren Aronofsky’s movie was exaggerated to a fantastical, supernatural degree:  Chazelle’s is meant to be taking place in a real one.

The direction is confident – not to say brazen, given how ropy some of Chazelle’s screenplay is.  On the eve of a big performance, Fletcher conducts a sadistically gruelling three-way audition for the drums:  Andrew eventually wins back a part that he’d already won.  The following day is one crummy melodramatic idea after another.  The bus taking Andrew to the performance venue has a flat tyre.  A nearby car hire place is closed until Andrew bangs on the office door to insist they’re still open.  He gets a car but leaves his drumsticks behind.  He dashes back from the concert hall to retrieve them.  He crashes the car.  He crawls out, bleeding, from under it and runs back to the concert at incredible speed.  He makes it onto the stage with seconds to spare.  Once the band starts playing, Andrew, in physical pain and with his nerves shredded, drops a drumstick and goes to pieces.  Fletcher has to call a halt to the performance and apologise to the audience.  Andrew then wrestles Fletcher to the ground.  Damien Chazelle handles the whole sequence of events with shameless conviction.

Andrew is meant to be so nerdy and fanatical that he hasn’t any friends – but there’s virtually no interaction between any of the students:  it’s not clear whether this is meant to illustrate Fletcher’s influence as conducive to terrible egoism or whether Chazelle simply hasn’t bothered to write any relationships within the group.  Jim Neiman (Paul Reiser) has doubts about his son’s ambitions but he supports Andrew.  It’s Jim who, with the lawyer, persuades Andrew to give a statement about Fletcher’s conduct:  Chazelle conveniently omits to explain what Jim thinks about Andrew’s then accepting Fletcher’s invitation to play in the second band.  The father trots along to the climactic concert just so that he can comfort Andrew when Fletcher humiliates him and look awed when the worm turns.  When he’s not practising drum rolls, Andrew goes to the cinema – with Jim.  Andrew admits this is odd for someone his age but odder is that Jim is never in evidence in the foyer, where Andrew talks with the popcorn-seller Nicole (Melissa Benoist), whom he asks on a date.  Damien Chazelle knows that he has some exciting highlights up his sleeve.  He’s not too bothered how he reaches them.

Miles Teller, with his blend of ordinariness and witty eccentricity, is engaging as Andrew – even if my main reason for rooting for the character was wanting to see Fletcher get his comeuppance.   This is clever casting:  Teller’s placidity and suggestion of innate decency make Andrew’s crazy, gut-busting efforts to be the world champion of the drum solo more startling.  His rejection of Nicole – which is purely a requirement of Chazelle’s scheme:  a girlfriend will get in the way of Andrew’s ambition – is upsetting because Teller is charmingly awkward in their early scenes together.  Melissa Benoist is touching as Nicole and Paul Reiser is good too, in spite of Jim Neiman being such a weak role.  But Whiplash is J K Simmons’ show.  His Fletcher, dressed in black T-shirt, jacket and trousers, is an intimidating figure.  He doesn’t carry an ounce of spare flesh – and, although he has a good many words, Simmons doesn’t waste any of these either.  He delivers the nasty invective with precision and panache – the more appalling Fletcher is, the more audibly a fair number of the Curzon Soho audience enjoyed him.  This can only be because Terrence Fletcher isn’t really a character at all.  He has no backstory and no real substance.  He is a performance.

21 January 2015

[1] Afternote:  This is wrong – Whiplash was his second feature.   According to IMDB, his first, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, was made in 2009, when Chazelle was only twenty-four.

[2] http://www.avclub.com/article/whiplash-maestro-damien-chazelle-drumming-directin-210473