Critics reviews

It's a nearly great film, a twisted masterpiece of sorts, about the drive to create art, and a rare film about music that seems to have been made by someone who understands the physical experience of *making* music: the way players in an ensemble seem to merge with the score, the conductor, and each other when they start to cook.

This dazzling, exhilarating drama from the young American director Damien Chazelle isn't a story about the roles played by misery and humiliation in forging a great artist. It's a story about what happens when people believe that's how great artists must be forged: both the mentors raining down pressure and the pupils whose souls are on the anvil.

At his most sympathetic, Fletcher explains himself to Andrew, in what we discover is a most duplicitous moment. So what, if anything, as a mentor, does he stand for? Despite its outstanding performances, the film fails to live up to its own potential in engaging the audience in far more meaningful ways. For a film that places so much attention on Charlie Parker, a man known for taking risks in his art, Whiplash plays it all too regrettably safe.

Had Fletcher been leaning over Chazelle's shoulder in the writing room, snapping at every mistake, such lapses of judgement might have been corrected. Nevertheless, Whiplash ends on a high note: Andrew's dazzling solo performance before a sold-out JVC festival crowd, with Fletcher egging him on. It's here that the film settles into precisely the right groove, with its two leads and the practice that binds them – and no moral lessons or supporting characters to get in the way.

This is a rabidly intelligent debut with a finale that is a fast-paced montage shot from above and below, in close up and in wide, cutting from instrument to instrument in perfect time to jazz standard, ‘Caravan'. As pumping a finale as this is, there are sufficient reminders along the way that one man's dream is another's grotesque isolation. Chazelle has made a film that entertains as it interrogates.

As a psychological drama about an overbearing teacher's emotional torture of a student, Whiplash is mildly successful. As a film about a student and a professor of jazz, Whiplash is as monumental a failure as one could imagine.

Everything about the performances in the film, especially the rehearsal techniques, struck me as unmusical. The parts where the director kept cutting the band off after it had played for half a second made me want to holler. The film shows a student practicing to the point of bloodshed and trying to play fast swing with a right arm that's so rigid it looks like it could be in cast.

Whenever [Teller and Simmons] share the screen, sparks fly, and director Damien Chazelle clearly knows it, introducing one subplot involving a potential romantic interest for Andrew only to quickly scuttle it. If Whiplash ultimately appears to suggest that great artists are the products of great tyranny—a discomfiting notion—it's worth noting that there any many historical cases (e.g., Mozart) that support the idea. In any case, it definitely makes for engrossing mano-a-mano action.

Edits occur on a rigid, rhythmic beat (call it young Eisenstein), while the consistently sickly pallor of the visuals makes it clear that this master-servant relationship is happening under a microscope. The thrill of the finale, when Andrew finally turns the tables on his creator, comes less from any flawless musical performance than the sight of a dyed-in-the-wool sociopath fully embracing his darkest nature. That's entertainment.

On leaving the screening I attended, I thought, "It's not that the movie gets jazz wrong—although it does—it's that it gets LIFE ON THE PLANET EARTH wrong." (Richard Brody has written most trenchantly on how it gets jazz wrong.) There's a lot of dynamic filmmaking on display here, most of it in the service of utter horseshit. First there's its near-Randroid vision of artistic excellence and non-compromise...

Chazelle is pilfering from Scorsese, but meaningfully, star-makingly. He's one of a tiny few American directors to come out from under all of that influence and to speak in a new, original language... Its blood is hot; it's got a manic, coked-up verve. But all of this work about suffering, struggling artists feels more documented than metaphorical.

The movie has no music in its soul—and, for that matter, it has no music in its images. There are ways of filming music that are themselves musical, that conjure a musical feeling above and beyond what's on the soundtrack, but Chazelle's images are nothing of the kind.