![]() And given that his father Jim (Paul Reiser) submerged his failure as a writer by becoming a high school English teacher, Andrew may also be fishing for a more authoritative father figure. (It also suggests a reason for the reputations of jazz and rock drummers as junkies or crazies.) Like a victim of the Stockholm Syndrome, Andrew bonds with his captor, mimicking Fletcher’s mode of personal rancor with his sometime girlfriend Nicole (Melissa Benoist). The difference is that Andrew wants to practice and play till his hands bleed that’s a visual badge of devotion to his craft that may become his art. In Andrew’s first session with the Studio Band, Fletcher keeps questioning the tyro’s tempo: “Were you rushing or were you dragging?” It’s mental and physical torture of the kind applied by Laurence Olivier as the Nazi dentist in Marathon Man when he asks Dustin Hoffman, “Is it safe?” In the movie’s scheme, they are mere sidemen to the central conflict: their leader’s mission to haze his drummers toward greatness or madness. Except for one early scene, he doesn’t ritually humiliate the other members of the Studio Band. (Clint Eastwood replayed the incident in his 1988 bio-pic Bird.) But Fletcher apparently believes the drummers, not the alto sax players, should get the abuse. He also enjoys citing a famous anecdote in which Count Basie drummer Jo Jones, in a 1930s gig with the raw teenager Charlie Parker, threw a cymbal at Parker when he went off-tempo. As he says, “There are no two words more harmful than ‘good job.'” We never learn why these students in the improv art of jazz have to play the exact charts of pieces at least 75 years old: Juan Tizol’s “Caravan” and Ray Noble’s “Cherokee.” (It’s as if an art teacher at the turn of the 20th century had told one brilliant student, “Hey, Picasso, stop painting those ladies as cubes!”) But we do know that Fletcher thinks the way to goad his pupils to their full potential is to demand more of them than they think they have to offer, and to refuse to accept less than what he thinks is their best. Chazelle also wrote the screenplay for Eugenio Mora’s 2013 Grand Piano, a thriller about a classical pianist who, on the night of his comeback concert, finds in his sheet music the note, “Play one wrong note and you die.”įletcher’s instructional style carries that kind of threat: that Andrew must play through the pain - that his life almost literally depends on his keeping the beat. (His script for the horror movie The Last Exorcism Part II doesn’t fit, so we’re ignoring it.) In his 2009 debut feature, Guy and Madeleine on a Park, characters burst into song - Chazelle also wrote the songs’ lyrics - as if in a Vincente Minnelli MGM musical or, given the black-and-white, spontaneous ambiance, Jean-Luc Godard’s New Wave lark A Woman Is a Woman. You go through Hell to reach your goal, and maybe Hell was the best, most intense part of the process.Ĭhazelle, a 28-year-old Harvard grad, has suffused most of his films with music. ![]() Directing with a cool, steady hand that renounces shaky-cam the way Fletcher would denounce rock ‘n roll, and getting strong performances from his two leads, Chazelle provides a potent metaphor for artistic ambition as both a religion and an addiction. A hit at Sundance and the Toronto Film Festival, where it was nicknamed Full Metal Drum Kit, Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash adds welcome flavor to the fall movie season, like Raisinettes sprinkled on a tub of popcorn.
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