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Dirty
fucking hippies: (l-r) Garner, Martin and Dano in Taking
Woodstock.
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Bad
Trip
By
Laura Leon
Taking
Woodstock
Directed
by Ang Lee
I
was at Woodstock, in a matter of speaking. That is, Woodstock
came to me, in the wee hours of a muggy August night, 1969.
I woke up with a start, feeling that something was off, and
aware of a gentle murmur that definitely wasn’t the usual
Berkshires crickets or the rush of the Housatonic River. Cautiously,
I descended the stairs, where I saw my middle-age mother,
clad in her cotton nightdress, standing in the front door.
I knew from experience, by the tension in her posture, that
she was about to do battle; and when I stood behind her, I
saw her quarry. Scores of hippies were camped out on our front
yard and that of our neighbors on either side. Our house was
just off the main drag, so it must have seemed an ideal spot
to rest en route to the Catskills. Unfortunately for these
music lovers, they hadn’t counted on my mother, who sent them
off in a tirade of invective and choice oaths. I was terrified,
but suitably impressed that Mom wasn’t cowed. “Woodstock,
my ass,” and “dirty, drug-smoking trash” were her underlining
philosophy.
That kind of fear and loathing is evident in Ang Lee’s Taking
Woodstock, a movie not so much about the concert itself
but about the efforts of a young businessman, Elliot Teichberg
(Demetri Martin) to help promote it, and possibly get his
parents’ dumpy motel, the el Monaco, out of debt. Elliot’s
dad Jake (Henry Goodman) and mom Sonia (Imelda Staunton) are
frumpy Jewish immigrants, hard working and unemotional, and
their son’s doe-eyed devotion is lost on them. Elliott is
supposed to be an interior designer with big dreams of moving
to the city, but he’s also a naïf, virginal and clean with
respect to drugs—that is, until Woodstock opens his eyes to
all sorts of possibilities. It’s a bit too much like Almost
Famous, without the sharp focus.
Lee floods his movie with colorful characters, such as Vilma
(Lieb Schreiber), the Korean War-vet (turned transvestite)
in charge of security, and Billy Hawkins (Emile Hirsch), Elliott’s
school-days buddy whose tour of ’Nam still resonates in the
hallucinatory flashbacks he experiences. Then there are the
“everyman and woman” real people of the town of White Lake,
who react with glee when the town of Bethel turns down the
concert promoters request for a permit, and are justly horrified
when Elliott offers them his own permit to put on a show.
The anger and resentment of the townspeople is touched upon
ever so lightly, as if Lee doesn’t wish to imply that they
were being pigheaded—or, more likely, Lee doesn’t want to
enter the murkier waters of human behavior. Time and again
he refrains from delving into anything meatier than a CGI
generated acid trip, leaving Taking Woodstock in a
sort of vacuum of humanity. Sure, there are masterfully executed
sequences showing thousands of people trekking through the
byways and hillsides of the Catskills, sliding in mud and
experiencing free love, but none of that resonates with anything
meaningful. Even Elliot’s “wide-eyed in Wonderland” shtick
is dealt with in a perfunctory way, with him being taken in
by an acid-tripping hippie couple (Kelli Garner and Paul Dano),
and then waking up next to the carpenter he’s been giving
the shy eye to. Trouble is, we can’t be sure if they consummated
their hinted-at connection, or there just wasn’t anywhere
else for either to crash. A late development involving Sonia’s
hidden machinations feels tacked on, almost like it belongs
in a separate movie.
Like its protagonist, Taking Woodstock is amiable and
without purpose, other than to cash in on a cultural phenomena.
In Elliott’s case, he wants to fix up the motel so that he
can go on to live his own life. In Lee’s, it’s to milk the
cash cow of the whole “remember Woodstock” craze, and to give
its misty-eyed audiences the idea that the beat goes on.
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