The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Films of the week Learning to play and playing to learn
WHIPLASH
Saturday, BBC Two, 11.20pm
THE dramatic possibilities of obsessions and obsessive behaviour are red meat for filmmakers, particularly where the arts are concerned.
Think Black Swan, The Red Shoes, maybe even Amadeus and Birdman, which deal with ballet, classical music and theatre acting respectively.
Director Damien Chazelle hit critical paydirt in 2016 when, aged 32, he became the youngest winner of the Academy Award for Best Director for the musical La Land, featuring Ryan Gosling as a Los Angeles jazz pianist struggling to make a name and a career.
But two years earlier he had announced himself with another jazz-themed film, Whiplash, and boy does this one feature obsessive behaviour. At its heart, is a troubling and abusive teacher-pupil relationship.
This time it’s drumming rather than piano-playing which is the means to drive the story. Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller) is a first year jazz student at a fictitious New York conservatory where he is desperate to catch the eye and the ear of Terence Fletcher (JK Simmons), a jazz instructor with a fiery temper and a reputation as a man who pushes his students to breaking point. How true that is and how far he will push is revealed as Neiman first finds favour and a place in the conservatory’s studio band, and then comes under pressure to make unpalatable sacrifices in his personal life.
These in turn come at a cost to his physical and mental health. The title, by the way, comes from Hank Levy’s 1973 composition and it’s while playing that piece that Neiman first feels the sting of Fletcher’s abusive tendencies. Literally, in this case.
An expanded version of a
2013 short film which also featured JK Simmons as Terence Fletcher, Whiplash makes a neat companion piece for La La Land, though where the second is expansive, glossy and ultimately uplifting, this has a pressured, claustrophobic feel and an ambiguous coda.
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PART female buddy movie and part high school comedy, Olivia Wilde’s pleasingly spiky film
proved one of the sleeper hits of last year and wound up in many critics’ Best Of 2020 lists. It’s easy to see why. The script is sharp and funny – there were four writers, all of them women – but it’s the interplay between leads Beanie Feldstein (Saoirse
Ronan’s sidekick in Lady Bird) and Kaitlyn Dever (so impressive in harrowing Netflix drama Unbelievable) that gives the film its zing.
Feldstein is Molly Davidson, Dever is her best friend Amy
Antsler and together they are the ambitious and high-achieving nerds at their Los Angeles high school.
We meet them on their last day of school as they prepare for life after graduation – Yale for Molly, a stint in Botswana helping women make their own tampons for Amy, whose ancient Volvo is covered in feminist slogans and who has been ‘out’ since the tenth grade though she still hasn’t kissed a girl. She has a crush on androgynous skater
Ryan but is too scared to talk to her.
With work and academia having taken centre stage in Molly and Amy’s lives there has been no time for the extracurricular activities their classmates have enjoyed – sex, drugs, parties, that kind of thing – but it’s a price they have been prepared to pay for success. But when Molly overhears three of her loser classmates dissing her and, even worse, learns that one is also going to Yale, the second to Stanford and a third to a six-figure job with Google, she is appalled. And so she persuades Amy that for one night only, they are going to party.
What follows is 12 hours of chaos, some of it dispiriting, much of it eye-opening, as they come to face to face with hard truths about their friendship, their attitudes to others and their own choices. Wilde’s preposterous setting is a little hard to take.
These are uber-rich LA kids who drive around in SUVs: it’s hardly real life and there are questions to be asked about the way she normalises privilege.
But it’s smartly done and hits all the right beats – as well as some very weird ones, such as animated section in which Molly and Amy turn into actual Barbie dolls after eating spiked strawberries.