Whenever someone laments the lack of leadership in government these days, the crisis seems to stem from deeper problems — the selfish examples, misdirection, and moral lapses that start at home. The confusion keeps coming up at the movies; this week in Whiplash, St. Vincent and The Judge, three different kinds of melodrama that all deal with the same issue: fatherhood from behind.
Whiplash is the worst because it’s full of the Sundance sanctimony that makes no sense beyond the main street of Park City, Utah (where the film won Grand Prize), but it indicates the ideological schmaltz upon which political correctness thrives. Young Andrew (Miles Teller) wants to be a jazz drummer, but at his exclusive Manhattan music conservatory he encounters the school’s most intimidating teacher, skinhead, gym-bodied Terence Fletcher (J. K. Simmons). Fletcher doesn’t nurture or encourage, he curses and browbeats students, who cower in awe of his belligerence. He’s more forceful than Andrew’s passive-aggressive divorced father (Paul Reiser), but his unproven erudition, when accosting school band members and torturing Andrew, exposes Whiplash as a petulant conceit.
Director-writer Damien Chazelle can’t decide if he’s examining art, authority, or masculinity. The pupil-teacher clash between weepy Andrew and foul-mouthed Fletcher covers the same territory as Black Swan, where student anxiety became overscaled hysteria. But Whiplash isn’t exactly a psychosexual fantasy; Chazelle traces the rigors of musicianship, fascinated with paternal (masculine) power: Slo-mo shots of Andrew dunking his blistered hands in ice water or close-ups of blood-stained cymbals denote WTF Raging Bull influence. (Has Chazelle never heard Ringo’s famous cry at the end of “Helter Skelter”?) Art pretenses get entangled with daddy issues — that’s where Chazelle’s reliance on political correctness proves his undoing.
As soon as a black female lawyer appears, initiating a suit against Fletcher (after Andrew injures himself in a car crash, then disrupts a competition concert), Whiplash reveals its deliberate, self-pitying co-opting of real artistic and social struggle. Apparently Fletcher’s black students are all jazz geniuses and never incur his racist, homophobic abuse. It’s all a show for Chazelle’s multi-culti Sundance piety, yet it displays no insight into either jazz or pedagogy. In Drumline, the 2002 college-marching-band movie, musicianship. mentorship, and a fatherless prodigy’s egotism were real subjects. But that All-American entertainment, set at a historically black college, wasn’t inflated with either psychobabble or cultural babble (Fletcher’s apocryphal tales about Charlie Parker and Joe Jones).
Simmons already played an ultimate Bad Dad as the leader of an Aryan Nation prison gang on HBO’s ferocious and brilliant series Oz. This typecasting is comparatively timid. Chazelle reworks the fatherly “It’s not your fault” defense from Good Will Hunting into Andrew’s “It’s not my fault” excuse. It critiques Fletcher’s lack of social grace, his art/race-fetishism. Andrew’s pure ambition (leading to a phony Carnegie Hall finale performing Hank Levy’s “Whiplash“) is all about a spoiled brat’s Oedipal fear. Conservatives would enjoy Drumline for its lively, disciplined bootstrapping while Whiplash caters to liberals’ tendency to reproach. “Whipping Post” might have been a better title for this sadistic film that shirks responsibility for selfish political attitudes.
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Bill Murray, rebounding from his disastrous appearance as FDR in Hyde Park on Hudson, plays a cantankerous Brooklyn loner in St. Vincent. Murray’s age and famous irreverence take the form of curmudgeonliness, specifically in Vincent’s response to life’s disappointments (retirement, a wife suffering dementia, society’s increasing folly). He updates the irascible W. C. Fields’s figure to the modern trials of a forgotten Vietnam War veteran. When asked about his military past, Vincent says “I think I’m imagining it”– the best vet response since Robert Altman’s Nashville.
Vincent’s social history separates him from Billy Bob Thornton’s iconic Bad Santa, whose vulgarity and insensitivity celebrated the worst aspects of contemporary culture. Vincent makes a fascinating father-figure — and comic foil — to Oliver (Jaden Lieberher), the adopted boy who moves in next door with his single mother. Oliver’s innocence and faith are at stake. Enrolled at a Catholic school, Oliver’s taught the definition of a saint while Vincent exemplifies flesh-and-blood ethnic fecklessness. The theory-vs.-practice life-lesson makes this film a more palatable example of the fallible-father trend in recent movies, from Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life to David Gordon Green’s Joe and the lamentable Mud.
Writer-director Theodore Melfi (making his feature debut) finds humor in Vincent’s one-man-army rebellion but doesn’t sanitize it. Melfi isn’t as poetic about working-class indolence as Dito Montiel was in his poignant, autobiographical A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, but Oliver learns a similar Catholic sense of forgiveness. Redemption extends to Melfi’s kind view of every character — even Vincent’s pregnant Russian hooker, played by Naomi Watts, and Oliver’s frazzled mother Maggie, at last a non-slob Melissa McCarthy.
The look Vincent gives Oliver before teaching him how to box connects them tightly. It’s filial — and that’s the essence of Oliver’s returned affection. Melfi’s slick humor (as in a Coens-style shot of Oliver mowing dirt while Vincent relaxes in a lawn chair) makes the film less than devout. Melfi even indulges some mild anti-clerical satire as if afraid of achieving spiritual sincerity, but the scene of Vincent’s beatification while wearing disheveled camos still makes a point about poverty and goodness that only a master filmmaker could improve. Murray’s Vincent recalls the fallible fathers seen in Wes Anderson movies. St. Vincent at its best recalls a Wes Anderson rough draft.
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In The Judge, Robert Downey Jr. gives a sometimes moving impression of how eternal teenager James Dean might have acted out today’s father dilemma. Downey plays Hank Palmer, a high-priced lawyer-scoundrel called back to his family’s hometown and his estranged jurist father (Robert Duvall). Their shared detestation and neediness (as the son defends the father against a murder charge) is Grishamy until a telling scene where Hank dons a Metallica t-shirt and goes bike-riding.
Playing an unevolved boy-man in this old-fashioned family drama fits Downey’s whip-smart extemporizing as much as James Dean’s Method anguish. It turns the family clichés into an archetypal personal crisis. The contemporary need to figure out what values we’ve learned, what steps we take toward social justice and personal reconciliation, are given some urgency by Downey’s unmistakable prodigal-son anxieties. It’s a whirl-a-gig performance spun by Downey’s post-junkie nerves; he has a debauched Cary Grant handsomeness, and what made his Iron Man unbelievable makes Hank’s cynicism seems genuine.
As Hank’s siblings, an autistic younger brother (Jeremy Strong) and a defeated older brother (Vincent D’Onofrio) provide a range to gauge his dissolute manner. (D’Onofrio’s brief scenes, illustrating sloth as pain, are especially effective.) Patriarch Duvall gives just what you expect: nuanced macho quirks of the type Sam Shepard merely externalizes. Duvall and Downey can spar ego-to-ego. The father’s discipline pushes his insecure son away, so they feel let down, missing the guidance and accomplishment each expected of the other. These are more credible and watchable family dynamics than the phony August: Osage County.
As the breakdown of the American family shows up more and more onscreen, it reflects epidemic selfishness as well as a crisis of leadership. (“The innocent can’t afford me” Hank boasts.) Like abandoned children, we look toward our forebears for answers. Director David Dobkin seeks the root of this dilemma, but his mix of humor and seriousness — as in his Wedding Crashers — is as uneven and contrived as that film. Still, the father-child predicament casts a real shadow.
— Armond White, a film critic, writes about movies for National Review Online and received the American Book Award’s Anti-Censorship prize. He is the author of The Resistance: Ten Years of Pop Culture That Shook the World and the forthcoming What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about the Movies.