Skip to main contentWhat was it like to be at Woodstock in 1969—to feel the harmonic energy at "the center of the universe," among thousands of minds unpolluted by prejudice and materialism? If Ang Lee's dramatic re-enactment Taking Woodstock is any indication, it was like this: You walked up to a cow pasture at dusk and Paul Dano, that preacher kid from There Will Be Blood, greeted you from the side door of a Volkswagen van. He informed you he hailed from Oregon. He talked about "ants making thunder" and shared a tab of acid. Inside the van, you watched finger-painted horses sway on the ceiling while Dano soothingly rubbed your leg. If things had gotten any groovier, it would have been time for a nap.
It didn't have to be this way. Ang Lee's direction has traditionally been at its most observant when he uses an outsider's perspective to chart American social rules, and their destruction (he did it in The Ice Storm, then repeated the trick in Brokeback Mountain). And with Elliot Teichberg's memoir, written under the name of Tiber, he's got plenty of sea changes to work with: Not only did Teichberg negotiate the Woodstock Music Art Fair's location change to White Lake, N.Y., but he also triangulated the event to save his parents' floundering motor lodge and came out of the closet, all in one weekend. The adventures of Elliot (portrayed here by Daily Show comedian Demetri Martin) should summon the industrious serendipity of hey-kids-let's-put-on-a-show musicals.
Instead, Taking Woodstock feels like some high-school senior threw a kegger, a few thousand extra guests showed, and Mom and Pop didn't mind too much. Not only are the events without consequence—none of what happens seems to have any immediate consequences. Much of the inertia is due to the movie's editing, which sets up conflicts and then drifts on to the next thing. A troupe of Aquarian thespians (led by the odious Dan Fogler) hole up in the Teichberg family barn, strip naked in front of the shocked townspeople of White Lake…and nobody mentions the incident for the rest of the movie. A disturbed Vietnam vet (Emile Hirsch) gets to slide through a mud puddle…and I suppose he's happy, since his trauma is never addressed further. Our closeted hero trades kisses with a strapping construction worker in the local bar, and wakes up next to the guy in his childhood bed…and that subject, too, is politely dropped. Everything is cool now, you understand. A motorcycle cop gives Elliot a ride to the show, and muses, "I thought I was going to come up here and bust some hippie skulls, but now…I don't know…."
If you don't know, officer, the movie isn't going to tell you. It offers no point of view other than a fuzzy hunch that this story definitely mattered at one time. In the second half, Lee starts incorporating split screens—when he tried this in Hulk, it signaled a passionate, if misguided, desire to experiment with form; here, it just means he's recycling the Scorsese-Schoonmaker edits from the Woodstock concert film. Taking Woodstock doesn't aspire to become the next best thing to being there. It just wants to be the next best thing to watching a documentary about being there.
The only area in which the movie displays any new insight is in its sensitivity to the anti-Semitic resentment roiling under the placid surface of Catskill towns. Elliot's Russian-Jewish parents are played by Imelda Staunton and Henry Goodman in finely observed studies of fear—the certainty that social turmoil will uncover old hatreds. But even here, Lee's control falters. In the penultimate scene of Taking Woodstock, Mrs. Teichberg is discovered asleep on the floor, clutching a pile of dollar bills. The image is simply baffling: How can Lee conclude a movie about the end of narrow-mindedness with the old libel of a suspicious Jewess hoarding money? The slur is surely accidental, but perhaps it was also inevitable. If you don't choose a point of view, one will eventually choose you.
is rated R. It opens Friday at Cedar Hills, Eastport, Cinetopia and Fox Tower.
WWeek 2015