Mild spoilers to “Whiplash” and “Blue Ruin” ahead
In perhaps the most gripping 10 minutes of film released last year, there are no explosions. There is no rubble. No smoke. No gunshots. Smoldering through in spasms between just three paltry lines of dialogue, there is only fire.
Terence Fletcher — a gargoyle of a jazz instructor whose educational technique would make most drill sergeants look like Mr. Rogers — piles the firewood high in the very first scene, but it’s his student who grinds the spark. Andrew Neiman does it alone, sitting behind his drum kit in those haunting 10 minutes, a steady stream of sweat pouring down to mix with the halo of blood that surrounds his fevered hands, blurring with activity. It collects at the tip of his drumstick. It dribbles into a slight pool, the size of a silver dollar, atop the drum’s batter head. And as when gasoline meets a struck match, hellfire emanates.
These are some of the thoughts, visceral and razor-sharp, that hew through you in the closing moments of Damien Chazelle’s sophomore feature, “Whiplash.” Lyrical, pulpy imagery belying the fact that there’s nothing even marginally poetic about the brand of screenwriting that inspires it. Chazelle’s script is a bare-bones, skeletal framework of dialogue that only reveals its pulse when Fletcher’s queued to pipe in, his cadence more symptomatic of dragon’s breath than spoken word.
The 30-year-old Chazelle, whose Best Director snub at the Oscars sadly recalls the year a young Paul Thomas Anderson wasn’t nominated for “Boogie Nights,” understands the blank palette his no-frills script offers. He uses it. The visual storytelling, on display in every corner of this movie, is breathtaking not just because the coloring and lighting garnishing it appears siphoned off an Edward Hopper painting. It’s also brutally efficient in a way that leaves very little room for recoil (or, dare I say, whiplash) by the time the credits roll. Chazelle has you on board, then jumping out of your seat even though the seatbelt is fastened. This is the only movie I’ve ever seen in a theater that demanded I be there for the next showing. The ending inspires this fanatic kind of commitment, one bordering on a hit of cocaine. And it’s done without words.
Nothing about Chazelle’s characters is obvious — nor should it be — but the story and visuals he constructs around them are tangible in a way that’s rarely seen in American cinema. The best way to describe it involves being swept down a river while clutching a retail mannequin: There’s almost nothing to be derived from what’s in your hands, or the two guides Chazelle has written on screen. They’ve been placed here for utility, their intentions almost one-note to the point of fault, but there’s no questioning the exhilaration in how immediately, forcefully even, the young writer-director is able to shove us in the right direction, following nothing but a current of bold filmmaking.
In that mesmerizing last scene, a jazz concert stage takes the place of a boxing ring. Neiman is the one doing all the hard work, but every drum stroke and rimshot takes the place of body blows he’s exchanging with Fletcher’s equally stubborn brand of savagery. One wants to prove his greatness, even if to no one else but himself. The other wants to prove he’s forging greatness, even if to no one else but himself. They’re a match made in heaven, an idea that comes to the forefront in those final 10 minutes. But any bluntness this simplicity could imply is replaced by frenzied pacing, glowing, roving lighting and a type of editing that can only be described as seizure-inducing in the best way. The frame leaps from Fletcher to Neiman and back to Fletcher and back to Neiman and often settles right above him, reverberating with the breakneck tempo of the music while we watch his hands, in their dance from one drum to the next, do their best to mimic a hummingbird in flight.
In one brief shot, the camera sits right outside the drum kit and does nothing other than pan quickly left to right and back, like someone quickly shaking their head, or more accurately, eyes darting from one end of the page to the next. The effect, the sparkling verve, is emblematic of this closing act, though in a larger sense, the rest of the film as well.
The 100-minute runtime is full of brutal sections where we see nothing more than Neiman abusing himself to attain a quicker beat. In essence, hit the drums faster. He practices until he can do nothing more than scream obscenities at himself and little rivers of hemoglobin run from his fingers down his kit. It’s further stylized in a shot where Neiman slumps the bloodied hands into a pitcher of ice water, then as while the frame-rate increases, we see the clearness of the liquid slowly become an imposing red. The kicker, though, and what makes this picture a beacon of great visual storytelling is the image that comes right after: A high-angle shot of Neiman’s face. Time has passed. It’s gaunt, broken under the eyes in a way that suggests manic turmoil.
It’s also efficient storytelling — we’re still clutching to that blank mannequin with the vacant look on its face, but the current tells us exactly why we’re there, it lets us guess at what’s inside.
Another film that gained notoriety last year for its inventive use of visual plot development also centers on a lonely misfit. In writer-director Jeremy Saulnier’s “Blue Ruin,” Macon Blair plays Dwight, a homeless man emotionally devastated by his parents’ deaths who sets out for revenge after the killer is set loose. Over long stretches, the film features no dialogue, just Dwight’s perpetually aghast face as he plays a game of reverse cat and mouse with his targets. He almost seems surprised at his own confidence, and it’s the confidence that, as in “Whiplash,” takes center stage.
We see it when Dwight steals a gun. Again when he stabs his target in the temple. And finally, in the closing shots when he decides to die. The conviction in these films is a direct result of simplicity, something that’s often forgotten at the American box office these days to make room for bigger budgets and bigger ideas. “The Avengers” have their qualities but it would be hard to find more than a minute in the movie without Robert Downey Jr. trying to push the plot along with a tersely worded insult. “Interstellar” represented a hallmark in grand, breathtaking imagery, a movie I loved, but again, it would be near-impossible to find a few seconds in its sprawling three hours without Matthew McConaughey’s twang. Harder still to fish out any ideal in the film that dared be smaller than “what is the mathematical meaning of love?” Amazing as the final product is, you’d be hard-pressed to find a moment of pure catharsis in “Boyhood.”
By contrast, the movement and framing for Chazelle’s concluding sequence is sealed off by an image so simple, so brilliant, I uttered an earnest “fuck yeah” on each viewing. Just two closeups of both characters exchanging a grin, in total understanding of one another and the fire they’ve scorched in our eyes. Fuck yeah, indeed.
