“There are no two words in the English language more harmful than good job,” declares Terence Fletcher, the viciously demanding jazz instructor in Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash. This sentiment doesn’t seem to have registered with critics, though, because Whiplash is one of the best-reviewed films of 2014. The lobby poster is chockablock with glowing blurbs and studded with the sort of gerunds that make publicists tremble: exhilarating . . . astounding . . . electrifying. Rotten Tomatoes (for whatever it’s worth) assigns the movie a positive score of 97 percent. “Even if you couldn’t care less about jazz drumming . . . Whiplash is a thrill to watch,” raves Dana Stevens in Slate. Chris Nashawaty echoes this sentiment in Entertainment Weekly: “You don’t have to be a jazz fan for Whiplash to zap you. . . . If you can appreciate the sight of two totally dialed-in performers simmering until they boil over, that’s enough. And P.S., that’s pretty much the definition of jazz.”
For Fletcher, jazz is a duel to the death, and he encourages a cutthroat environment. When he recruits Andrew, the young drummer begins as an understudy and page turner for Carl (Nate Lang), the core player, but after Carl fumbles at a competition, Fletcher promotes Andrew to the lead spot. This triumph is short-lived, however; almost immediately, Fletcher finds an even younger student, Ryan (Austin Stowell), to position as usurper to the drum throne. Finally he pits all three of them against each other, banishing everyone else from the classroom and endlessly rotating the drummers until one of them can execute a fiendishly fast double-time swing rhythm. This torture session goes on for hours until Andrew finally wins; the sequence is undeniably compelling, but it seems to have been lifted from Hoosiers or any of a hundred other movies about a coach whipping his team into shape.
Directed by Damien Chazelle
