Obviously jazz drumming is extremely difficult, nuanced work, but Whiplash never establishes that beyond loud noises the characters make sometimes. It takes more than yelling and grunting to make something seem as difficult as the drumming needs to be for the movie to work. Photo courtesy Sony Pictures Classics.
Whiplash, a movie about how hard drumming is, is so bad it actually makes drumming look kind of easy.
Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller) plays an aspiring jazz drummer who wants to be the very best, like no one ever was. Neiman gets into Shaffer Conservatory, hailed in the film as the best music school in the U.S., and is quickly admitted into the top jazz band conducted by Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons), who is the kind of teacher that only got the job to justify his own anal-retention, cruelty and severe bi-polar tendencies. The kind of guy who genuinely laments the decline of corporal punishment. The movie is about Fletcher’s castigation of Neiman and Neiman’s increasingly insane attempts to earn his approval.
Whiplash has admirable focus, which is another way of saying it has tunnel vision. Jazz drumming is the most important thing in the world to Neiman, and being a huge, irredeemable ass to his students is the most important thing in the world to Fletcher. But there is no entry point for anyone who doesn’t share those interests. There is only this pair of awful, one-dimensional characters butting heads over auditory details few in the audience will even begin to understand.
