Taking Woodstock

TAKING (the Music Out of) Woodstock!....OK, maybe my re-worked title is somewhat over the top. But then "Taking Woodstock" is a bit over the top, too! Hell, 1969 was over the top, wasn't it?! But who really cares! Come on, people! It's a Movie! Name ONE film set in 1969 that isn't a little overdone. I should know about Woodstock; I was THERE.......in spirit!

Sadly, as much as I, and about 50% of Americans in my age demographic, longed to be present, we formed part of the 98%(of the half) who couldn't make it. The other 50%, incidentally, were probably praying for the earth to open up and swallow those 1/2 million music, marijuana and peace-loving souls. ("Nearly 500K attended Woodstock" -Wikipedia) Director Ang Lee has really amazed me. He has made...

A) The film that best encapsulates, captures the true essence, of this great cultural benchmark concert and most extremely divisive moment in our nation's history since the Civil War!

B) He did this despite being someone from outside our American culture!

C) He has managed to serve up what was, for me at least, the one of most entertaining and vibrant movies of 2009.

Laughed so hard at times, I cried! I can't even REMEMBER the last movie that did that for me!!! Isn't that what movies are supposed to be all about?

Demetri Martin is the late-twenty-something-good-Jewish-Still-living-at-home-son, who serves as the concert's catalyst. Martin renders his role with great finesse, aplomb and stand-alone chutzpah! (Check out his resume on IMDb: What a multi-faceted talent)

But the real scene-stealer was a TOTALLY unrecognizable Imelda Staunton, as the Jewish mother from Hell! She should have at the very least received an Oscar nomination! Fascinating "Woodstock" dichotomy: Martin's character is right there, in the center of the firestorm...and yet, NOT! What a great metaphoric irony for the millions of us, who were and weren't there, either!

Despite a few flaws, a Resounding 9*********

..... ENJOY! / DISFRUTELA!

I saw this movie being very attracted by the trailer which seemed to offer fun and deep involvement. Now I have seen it, and I can say that it is enjoyable, but not fully convincing. Obviously, Ang Lee drifts attention from the concerts and the music of those three epic days in 1969 to focus on the personal story of a young man and his odd family who worked and lived in the background of this great event. The characters are engaging, very well interpreted, but in the end I missed the real protagonist, music, being it the powerful means through which these young people gave voice to their need for change and revolution and which was revolutionary, indeed. The atmosphere of those days is rendered vividly, we get many physical perceptions, of naked bodies, mud, rain, sun, but not acoustic ones, and I perceived this as a flaw throughout the movie. In the end you ask yourself: wasn't Woodstock mainly a three-day concert? Where is music? The movie is solidly directed, the director knows perfectly what kind of product he wants to offer, and in the end we get fun and reflection around, but never inside an event, which never comes to be explicit. Very good actorial interpretations (Imelda Staunton playing the mother is simply wonderful), although the characters themselves appear to be looking for a soundtrack which lacks till the end.

I worshiped the youth culture from afar in the late sixties. I was too young to participate but did my best to disrupt jr. high assemblies with the Fish cheer. I didn't know about the Woodstock Festival until two weeks after it occurred, and I remember how much I hated being oppressed by a traditional establishment patriarchy who wouldn't even drive me across town to an anti-war demonstration. When I finally saw the documentary the following year, I knew I had missed something that was epic and iconic. (Big sigh...)

I had been looking forward to "Taking Woodstock" since I first read that it was in production. I was particularly eager to see Demetri Martin in a starring role; I've admired him for some time. I've also spent quality time in the Catskills--I love that part of the country. Lee's film certainly captures the beauty of White Lake, and generally recreates the groove and vibe of a specific time and place, but the narrative seemed somehow disjointed (unintentional pun) There seemed to be too many empty moments substituting for poignancy, and undeveloped stories that might have added a bit more depth to Lee's tale.

Demetri Martin as Eliot Teber, was adorable but I was frustrated by his poker face (something that makes his stage comedy hilarious). I enjoyed Liev Schreiber whose drag was not only believable, but also compelling. Henry Goodman, as Eliot's beleaguered father, was also finely developed, but Imelda Stauntan played his mother as a shrewish fishwife with virtually no redeeming character qualities. Not even after pot brownies.

Seeing "Taking Woodstock" makes me miss my long lost soundtrack of the original concert, something I shall remedy this weekend. I'm also eager to watch the documentary again with it's hippie-trippie split screens and portraits of long gone poets, artists, and other kindred spirits.

Building a sweet coming-of-age comedy around a major American cultural event of the Sixties, 'Taking Woodstock' is lodged on the periphery of the legendary half-million-strong August 1969 "peace and love" rock concert held on Max Yasgur's 600-acre dairy farm near the hamlet of White Lake, in the town of Bethel, New York. While director Ang Lee gives perhaps the most vivid sense on film yet of what it might have been like to witness the event unfolding as a "townee," he approaches it crab-wise, getting inside it by hovering on the outskirts.

In a recent interview with Charlie Rose, Quentin Tarantino remarked at how hackneyed biopics are. He suggested the best way to depict the life of Elvis would be to make a movie about one day in the life -- say, the one when The King walked into Sun Records the first time. Lee takes a similar approach to the enormous muddy happening of August 15-18 1969 (this film is a 40th-anniversary celebration). After all it's been thoroughly covered by documentary filmmakers, and most of the acts were thoroughly filmed and recorded. But 'Taking Woodstock' partly trumps that real footage by depicting how the happening built like an invasion, focusing on some of the locals and the promoters and a couple of the acid heads but never even focusing on the stage at all.

This might sound like a Robert Altman knockoff, but it's really quite different. Lee isn't trying to build up Woodstock through lots of vignettes and pieces. This is more like Tolstoy's vision of the Battle of Waterloo, but instead of the battle itself, the distant noise and tumult is that of a concert with thousands swarmed around it. That's true for a moment or two, at least, and those moments are haunting. But Ang Lee is no Tolstoy (though he did his own peripheral (Civil) war picture in Ride with the Devil). In the end he doesn't focus on the battle at all. Though Lee's young protagonist, Elliot Teichberg (Demetri Martin), a gay Jewish every-youth and the dutiful son of an impoverished middle-aged couple whose decrepit motel has useless pretensions to being a Catskills resort, is depicted as making it all happen by, as head of the minuscule township's Chamber of Commerce, linking up charismatic, bushy-haired young promoter Michael Lang (Jonathan Groff) with enterprising dairyman Max Yasgur (Eugene Levy), Ellie remains a peripheral figure of the concert, not even the witness of any of the 32 acts performed on stage. Ang Lee's new film lacks the somewhat hackneyed solemnity and pretension of his (admittedly far more emotionally powerful) 'Brokeback Mountain' or (much more stylish) 'Lust, Caution,' but his idea of depicting a great event, like Breugel, by magnifying peripheral figures, is a nifty one.

Elliot Teichberg is the main such Breugel figure, but his parents, the long-suffering Jake (Henry Goodman), and the rigid, paranoid Sonia (Imelda Staunton) loom large for him and us, humble laborers who make the crucifixion come to life. So do the damaged but charismatic young Vietnam vet Billy (Emile Hirsch) and Vilma (Liev Schreiber), the drag queen security guard who's a link with Ellie's New York life as a budding interior decorator, and with the Stonewall riots that had happened just a couple weeks earlier when Elliot was in Lower Manhattan. And there are plenty of others, notably the VW Guy (Paul Dano) and VW Girl (Kelli Garner), who start Ellie on a wonderful acid trip in their van, becoming his guides on an introductory tour of psychedelics. Yeah, "you had to be there," but as hackneyed as the Trip trope is, this is a good one: in its details as in its overall approach, 'Taking Woodstock' often succeeds because it doesn't try too hard and is cozy, offhand, and humorous.

The Sixties aren't about heroics or style, but about getting down, smashing barriers, breaking free -- way-stations of the romantic experience and milestones in any coming-of-age. Woodstock didn't really happen on the stage but in the mud and vans and tents, and Lee shows it that way. Its realities also included an insufficient number of Porta Potties, and townspeople raging at Elliot and Max for making the event happen but then charging big fees for cabins or sandwiches or a drink of water. Elliot's own mother is one of these. But then, somebody gets Jake and Sonia high and they dance in the rain. The motorcycle cop comes to do crowd control and ends up wearing a flower and giving rides. It's corny, but it happened. On the other hand, the borderline caricature depictions of Jews, Schreiber's amiable but overly broad transvestite, and even Emile Hirsch's clichéd, if lively, battle-scarred vet, all could have been thought through better.

Broaching such large events even peripherally, Lee and his writers, James Schamus, Elliot Tiber (author of the source memoir) and Tom Monte, arguably do owe us a bit more of the sex, the bad trips, and the music itself -- which can't be left outside the story of a great concert, whether its protagonist got to the stage or not. If you look at the real people -- Michael Lang, for instance -- they were rougher and sexier than anybody in this movie. The images of Elliot Teichberg's coming-of-age are as lightweight as everything else, and in the superficial sketching of his gayness the movie is as bland as the ditsiest biopic. 'Taking Woodstock' is a sweet, gentle, easy take on events. But remember that it's a coming-of-age comedy that happens in the midst of a tumultuous event, and you'll see that the light touch is not invalid. This was not the great Bad Trip concert; it was the great Good Trip concert. And the light touch allows the film to feel comprehensive with delicacy and keep its focus on the young man's sensibility.

Ang Lee and James Schamus like their hippie culture, and love themselves that August 1969 summer of Woodstock, and also the act of trying to capture it on film as it was to be there, on the outside and suddenly coming into the fold of looking in. One can feel the love for the period, the people, the music, the drugs, the whole scene, man. If it doesn't make for the greatest movie it might just be cause Lee has decided to make a precisely light-hearted affair with some fun moments but nothing really hard-hitting with its coming-of-age story. It's a been-there-done-that affair in terms of the major characters, and its more significant background subject provides more of the color and excitement in its two-hour run time.

It's basically about the people behind the scenes at Woodstock (we never see anyone famous, aside from certain semi-figures like Michael Lang and Max Yasgur, portrayed by actors), specifically the young guy Eliot who got together the Woodstock-financial people to his small town as part of Bethel, New York, and helped also to give (politely putting it) a boost to his parents' motel business. We see some of the ups and downs, the downs being things like gangsters trying to muscle their way into the earnings of the thousands of people flocking upstate to frequent the motel (and the up of getting 'security' with transvestite Liev Schreiber in an awesome performance), or just with Elliot's parents and how their attitudes stay mostly the same- what's with these damn kids and their hair and sex and drugs anyway- until towards the end of the three days of peace/love/music.

It's a funny movie for at least a good amount of its run-time. The writer Schamus knows how to milk some laughs out of small-town fears and those scenes of freak-outs that shake up the quiet veneer of rural upstate New York. One good example of this are the folks in the 'theater troupe' who live in Elliot's barn and who remind one of the mime troupe from Easy Rider (lots of naked reenactments of Chekhov). And I even liked how Martin navigates himself in scenes where he has to act perplexed but not show it too much like, "oh, hey, lots of hippies, OK, got to get back to work, whoa!" When it comes time for the more dramatically demanding scenes from Martin (a relatively inexperienced actor and mostly comedian by the way) he falls flat, or looks wonky when tripping his ass off with Paul Dano - a weird but affecting scene, by the way.

Lee decided, more or less, to just take it easy this time around. After the heavy head-trips of Hulk, Brokeback Mountain and Lust Caution, the guy needed to have a laugh, and what better way than to have some good times and breezy moments in reflecting on the one time hippies didn't get stomped down by cops or just wear lots of flowers in their hair. And when its airy and fun it works. When it tries to add some complexity (i.e. a gay innuendo moment is put out there and then never really mentioned again much to my dismay) and starts to get a little preachy towards the last quarter with Elliot having to come to terms with his life and working at his parent's motel (and discovering a dark secret about his rambunctious, irascible old Russian-Jewish mother played respectably by Imelda Staunton) it falls flat on its face. But its worth watching for those little moments - like when Elliot rides on the back of the motorcycle cop through the dense traffic of the road to the Woodstock concert. It's like the good-natured version of the traffic jam from Godard's Week End: less a-holes and more hippies.