Whiplash (2014)

USA
written and directed by: Damien Chazelle
starring: Miles Teller, J.K. Simmons
seen: 4th August, 2017

It starts as a story about details, but it turns out it's being told by someone with a short attention span. Or I don't know how to pay the kind of attention this film requires. A big minus on my part probably is that I don't have a musical ear and I can find pleasure even in out of tune music as somebody once explained to me. Just this already means that a lot of the film's content goes past me. And maybe all of the film's content and its meaning goes right past me. Or I feel like it's a film about sticklers that wasn't made by a stickler and that makes me, a stickler, somewhat confused. Or maybe it's a film obout sticklers made by a stickler completely sticking with screenwriter's and film-maker's guidelines and that makes me, a non-stickler, miss a moment of real surprise and the courage to not engage with trivialities and show only the stuff relevant to the chosen theme. But it's the directors first big film so it's possible to have hopes that he learns to avoid cliches like anything with a girlfriend that an ambicious and callous bastard can be ambicious and callous towards or footballer cousins that mock him during a family dinner where nobody understands him and apparently nobody likes music.

An actor, who's obviously not nineteen, plays a nineteen year old kid. How am I supposed to believe those naive tears during an apology call to the girlfriend when they're being shed by a man obviously closer to being thirty that twenty? Sometimes the actuall age of an actor doesn't matter but this is the time when I believe it's quite important. And despite my nearly undying love for J.K. Simmons I have a big problem with his performance. Either the role of the teacher is just badly written (and it probably is, those wtf switches between talking sweet with a little girl in the sunset and twating in a cold room with blue overtones two seconds later are put together so clumsily I can't even laugh about it - and a sense of humour is something this film misses quite essentialy). Or it's just badly cast and acted (Which is probably also true, because J.K. has the same expression in his eyes in both modes and his voice and body language reminds me of someone following instructions rather than someone giving a performance worthy of praise and prizes. I was confused during my first showing of the film, because sometimes it felt like a too much of a parody to be taken seriously and I wasn't sure what was I supposed to feel according to the author. When I played some of the practise scenes and the final confrontations without sound I couldn't tell what was emotionally going on. He looks the same when intimidating his student and being swept away with the music. To me, that's not a sign of a good performance nor a good supervisor.)

In my ideal world, given that owning a time machine is a thing, this movie would be directed by Steve McQueen during his "Hunger" days. That was also a debut. His movie would consist of like six informational story scenes and the rest would be made of FLESH. That would be a movie I could respect.