Taking stock of Woodstock is what Taking Woodstock is all about. Sort of.
The three-day musical gathering and anything’s-possible happening that would come to define a countercultural generation provides the background, rather than the foreground, for this remembrance, which — with plot and conflict in rather short supply — sometimes seems as muddy as the event itself.
Based on the memoir by Elliot Tiber, Taking Woodstock is a sweet, slim, nostalgic comedy about what led to the three days of peace and music that seemed to change the world. as well as the impact it had on one man and his family — and vice versa.
Demetri Martin plays Elliot Teichberg, a struggling interior designer in Greenwich Village who has moved upstate to his parents’ rundown motel in the Catskill Mountians, the El Monaco, in the summer of 1969 as the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival is being planned.
As the chairman of the local chamber of commerce in the village of Bethel, Elliot hears that the neighboring town of Wallkill has denied the request for a permit for the music festival. So he contacts the producers, hoping to scare up some business for the motel and help his parents keep up with their mortgage payments, and suggests that they change the venue to the 600-acre dairy farm in White Lake owned by neighbor Max Yasgur.
Within a month, money from Manhattan promoters had made its way to upstate New York and half-a-million festivalgoers — an invasion of hippies, as many locals saw it — are on their way to Yasgur’s farm in White Plains, New York to experience the colossal musical conclave, with its host of iconic performers, including Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Who, Joe Cocker, Richie Havens, the Grateful Dead, Joan Baez, and Arlo Guthrie, just to name a few.
In the film, those high-profile performers remain in the far distance and are neither portrayed nor even glimpsed. Instead, the ancillary characters who figure in include Emile Hirsch, who plays a bitter Vietnam veteran, Liev Schrieber as a cross-dressing ex-Marine security guard , Eugene Levy as neighboring farmer and concert host Max Yasgur, Jonathan Groff as the mastermind of the event, Dan Fogler as the head of a theatrical troupe, and Imelda Staunton and Henry Goodman as Tiber’s parents.
Oscar-winning director Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Sense and Sensibility; The Ice Storm), working from writer-producer James Schamus’s adapatation of the book by Elliot Tiber and Tom Monte (Taking Woodstock: A True Story of a Concert, a Riot, and a Life), does not try to re-create the concert itself (after all, the indelible 1970 documentary, Woodstock, already exists) or to explore all the themes prominent in the book. Instead, he concentrates on caturing the period — which he accomplishes splendidly — and paints a portrait of what he has sometimes called our “last moment of innocence.”
But the easygoing, episodic approach that Lee takes to the material also blocks our desired admission into the concert itself. In focusing so much on the prosaic stories of these peripheral characters, the director leaves us feeling somewhat removed from the proceedings. And although we may understand why the musical performances are not included on-screen, we nonetheless miss them, which stops the film from being satisfying.
Lee’s self-effacing memoir could certainly have used an actor in the lead who could have made more of an impression than standup comic Martin, whose Elliot is just not vivid or compelling enough as a central figure. We find ourselves wishing the script would concentrate on somebody else instead.
Consequently, this is a muted, whimsical, upbeat reminiscence about an earthquake of a concert, a clash of cultures, and a coming of age. A bit too oblique for its own good, Taking Woodstock is a light comedy that’s light on music, but that sheds a good deal of light on the concert of concerts.
120 minutes
In theaters August 28, 2009
Rating: R, Drama
Bill Wine - Celebrity News Service Movie Critic/ AHN (under license)
