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| Probable dialogue: “Come on, swing, you mother— SWIIIIIING! YEAH! YEAAAH!” |
So, I hear the big hit at this year's Sundance Film Festival was Whiplash, a movie about the tumultuous relationship of an abusive, hard-driving jazz drum teacher and his student, and the shatteringly emotional, high-stakes world of jazz education...
Now, I've been... ahm... I... gaha... yeah. Let's everybody settle down... try to keep it together.
I guess any mainstream acknowledgement of the existence of jazz, and that playing music is a thing people do, is a good thing, but I have to say, I am cringing from the get-go here. I look at the still, and all I see is a very sympathetic drum teacher understandably screaming at his student for not knowing how to set up his drums, and for having just rotten-looking technique. (Alternate probable dialogue: “You play like an actor who picked up the drums four months ago for a role in some crummy made-for-cable-melodrama!!!”)
From the Salon piece on the film:
This is a muscular and accomplished work of kinetic cinema built around two tremendous acting performances, and it’s really about teaching and obsession and the complicated question of how to nurture excellence and where the nebulous boundary lies between mentorship and abuse.
Chazelle [the director] clearly understands the intensely competitive world of music schools in general and jazz education in particular,
Italics mine. College was intensely something, but I don't know if competitive is the first adjective that springs to mind. There was a little bit of that, and there was always some judging of abilities going on among the students, but mostly everybody was just really into music. Maybe I went to the wrong schools.
but “Whiplash” is about jazz in almost exactly the same way that “Black Swan” is about ballet. Miles Teller (of “21 & Over” and “The Spectacular Now”) really does play the drums, and that’s where his character, a socially awkward 19-year-old conservatory student named Andrew, is most at home. (I’m pretty sure a professional drummer is used for the most difficult passages, but Teller’s pretty good.)
No, he's not. I saw the photo.
The musical performances in the film are intensely compelling, and drive the drama forward to a large extent, just as the big game drives a football movie or opening night drives a backstage musical. Chazelle also captures the fact that music is always a physical endeavor, a fact exaggerated by the demands of the drum kit; Andrew literally sheds blood, sweat and tears in his pursuit of greatness.
Well, Andrew is an asshole. If he's in this for “greatness.” Maybe I could stand to watch a real musician beat some decent artistic and human values into this kid for 90 minutes, after all...
More after the break:
