“Whiplash” is a movie that came out almost a decade ago, but I just recently watched it with some friends. Even though I first watched it about a month ago, I’ve watched it two or three times since then and it’s already one of my favorite movies ever. At the time, it was very highly acclaimed, winning several Oscars, including Best Supporting Actor, Best Film Editing, and Best Sound Mixing. I’d heard it was a really good movie, but it blew away all my expectations. This movie is best if you go into it blind, but I’ll try to describe a bit of the premise without giving too much away.
The story focuses on a college student named Andrew Neiman, who was accepted into one of the best music schools in the country. The school’s jazz band program is incredibly demanding and expects nothing but the best from the students. Andrew knows this going in, but has no idea what is in store for him. He meets with Terence Fletcher, one of the best professors of music at the school, who seems strict but kind upon their first meeting. Once Andrew gets into Fletcher’s classes, however, he really starts to understand how far Fletcher is willing to go to forge the next great musician.
Fletcher, played by J.K. Simmons won best supporting actor for this role, and you can really tell. He steals the spotlight at every available opportunity, and when he’s on screen, all eyes tend to fall on him. This movie is incredible at building tension, better than almost every story I’ve seen before, and Fletcher is the catalyst for most of this.
What is especially interesting to me is the setting in which this story builds tension. Usually there are some very high stakes in order to build the level of tension that this movie does, but it’s just a music school. The world isn’t going to end if the tension snaps; it’s very centralized around these two characters and their musical ability.
But enough about Fletcher, I want to focus more on Andrew now, who undergoes significant character growth through this movie, at a very fast pace. At the beginning, he’s pretty reserved, he sticks to himself and doesn’t put himself out there all that much. As he begins to interact with Fletcher, he grows steadily more and more confident, eventually getting too confident, and he starts to snap and yell at people later on in the movie. This very sudden transformation is a core part of this movie I think, and I’m honestly a little surprised that his actor, Miles Teller, wasn’t nominated for anything at the Oscars that year. This transformation of his character is almost a metaphor for the name of the movie itself, or at least that’s how I saw it. “Whiplash” is named after a piece of music that they play in the movie, but it seems like it could also be a double meaning for Andrew’s character, suddenly going from reserved to a somewhat aggressive person.
Overall, I think this movie is fantastic, and I could go on and on about how good the movie’s soundtrack and other little moments were, but that would take all day, and we don’t have that kind of time, nor space in the paper. I would rate this movie an easy five out of five stars, for incredible writing, music, characters, and so much more. “Whiplash” definitely falls within my top five movies of all time, and I think it’ll remain there for quite a while. I would recommend this to anyone who loves a good, tense movie to keep them on their toes. However, I should probably warn those who are interested, this movie does contain significant emotional distress and a lot of yelling, so if you aren’t interested in watching something like that, that’s perfectly understandable. Regardless, “Whiplash” can be found on Netflix for those who want to watch it, which again, I cannot recommend enough.
