We have all seen movies that were really good. We have all seen movies that were really bad. Every so often, we come across a movie that everyone says is really good, but ends up being bad. This is one of those movies. It hides its badness really well. It thinks it has a compelling story. It has great performances. It has great pacing. The excitement never lets up. However, the first thing I said to my wife when the credits started rolling was, “That was hollow.” I could not make that pronouncement until the last moment, because the movie was compelling enough to keep me watching, but the story did not measure up to the excitement of the experience.
Andrew Neiman is a 19 year old who is obsessed with the drums. He ends up being selected by Terence Fletcher (JK Simmons, who deserves his Oscar for this, even though the movie doesn’t deserve his performance) to play in his studio band. Most of the hour and forty five minutes of this movie is constituted by Fletcher berating all the members of his band with disgusting profanity and epithets. He does tend to focus in on Neiman, and Neiman’s entire life becomes wrapped up in either pleasing or simply appeasing Fletcher. To this main story line is added two subtexts. First, there is an almost throw away love interest who Andrew does indeed throw away so he can devote himself to the drums. This subplot is a dead end. It tries to serve as a way to see Andrew’s desire to focus on his music, but instead succeeds in making Andrew less likable and less human. Second, Neiman’s father (Paul Reiser) roots for his son but he seems to really only function as a motivating factor for his son. Andrew seems to see his father as an artistic failure, and Andrew seems to use his father's story as a catalyst to be the next jazz drumming legend. Neither of these characters serve the story that well, because the story is more interested in the conflict between Fletcher and Neiman. This would be fine, but since neither of them are sympathetic, the father and love interest seemed to be slapped in to make us slightly more sympathetic to Andrew. The characters of Neiman’s father and love interest are (I think) supposed to show is Neiman’s devotion to music, but instead they shine a light on his narcissism. Whether or not I am supposed to root for Neiman is unclear. I am certain I am not supposed to root for Fletcher. Then again, this is art: maybe I am not supposed to root for anyone-but the movie does not have the conviction to take a stand.
The movie is hollow because it has no point. Any point that it tries to make is blocked off by some competing view some where along the way. Some movies don’t have a point or any gravitas, and that indeed is the point (a movie like “Airplane” comes to mind). But to have such a compelling drama in front of us with so much potential and so little to say is a colossal disappointment. After all, sometimes movies that are done well in so many ways are the biggest disappointments. They give us something, then take it away because they don’t have a cohesive story or point of view. The movie hopes to give us the dark side of “Mr. Holland’s Opus”, but instead ends up being about almost nothing.
