Since music was the ostensible reason for Woodstock, a Woodstock movie minus the music might seem an empty endeavor. Fact is, many of the half-million who flocked to the festival 40 years ago heard little and saw less of the all-star lineup. Traffic into the festival site had congealed. Sightlines and sound were dubious, and many participants probably caught little more than the wafting snippets of sound heard in Ang Lee's film, Taking Woodstock.
Loosely based on the memoirs of Elliot Tiber, whose family owned a ramshackle motel at the festival's rim, Taking Woodstock is both a fictionalized "making of" account and a plunge into a lost moment in time. It's also intended as a rare comedy by Lee, an excellent dramatist with no rhythm for laughter. There are occasional funny bits, usually involving Tiber's kvetching Old World Jewish family, but the screenplay by James Schamus ladles out the borscht a little too liberally. Likewise, Emile Hirsch plays the crazy Vietnam veteran as a stereotype that should, at long last, be retired from circulation.
As always, Lee nails the look of his setting, especially the slightly hangdog appearance of everyday middle-class America and the murky, black-and-white televised backdrop of Vietnam casualties and the moon landing. However, long patches of Schamus' dialogue sound like the groovy argot of the sort of Hollywood hippies who turned up on "Beverly Hillbillies" and other sitcoms of the late-'60s. Can we hear you say "far out"?
Demetri Martin is good, playing Elliot as nerdy, wide eyed and swept up by history. A closeted young gay who failed to make it in art and interior decorating, he is determined to save his parents' ailing motel and bring cutting-edge culture to upstate New York. The organizers of the Woodstock Festival tapped him as their community liaison, a potentially thankless task in a town with an endemic hatred of hippies and barely suppressed anti-Semitism. Elliot pointed the way to the laconic dairy farmer Max Yasgur, played like a pipe-smoking Buddha by Eugene Levy, who rented out his pasture for the event in a spirit similar to that of the organizers. He wanted to make money and he thought it would be a good thing to do.
Taking Woodstock trips nostalgically into the muddy romp that Woodstock becamefor free love before the bill arrived and for the fleeting glimpse of oneness that a psychedelic experience among a half-million friendly faces can afford. Lee shows without comment the many conflicting tendencies within the crowd, less the unified "Woodstock Nation" of legend than a confederacy united by music and a vague longing for something new.
The real-life aftermath was as ambivalent as the movie's end, in which one of Woodstock's starry-eyed impresarios plans for the follow-up concert. "It's going to be even more beautiful than this one," he says. Hindsight identifies the concert he refers to as the deadly, upcoming festival at Altamont, where the Hells Angels, hired by the Rolling Stones to keep order, ended the '60s in a disharmonious, minor key.
