Taking Woodstock

By Matt Prigge
Add Comment Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted Aug. 25, 2009

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Give Ang Lee’s disappointing Woodstock saga some credit: It’s not just the latest totemic paean to that time of tumultuous change and let-the-sunshine-in halcyon daze that was the ’60s. It doesn’t feature Elijah Wood as Joe Cocker, Xzibit as Sly Stone or Hayden
Pannettiere as Joan Baez. There’s barely any ’60s music at all (except for a god-awful Danny Elfman generic ’60s score), and nary a hippie-sighting till around the half-hour mark.

No, the angle chosen by Lee and longtime, novelistic screenwriter James Schamus is the festival’s modest roots as a hastily and messily assembled near catastrofuck. After being booted from the original venue in Wallkill, N.Y. (with big bucks already in the can) the organizers were saved by one Elliot Tiber (Demetri Martin), a budding interior decorator whose Russian parents owned a dicey Catskills “motel.” He in turn directed the fest to the sprawling digs of farmer Max Yasgur (Eugene Levy), and from there the quiet town of Bethel, N.Y. was overrun with kindly, blitzed-out nomads, much to the ornery townsfolk’s ire.

Given that the release date lands not long after the fest’s 40th anniversary, it’s appreciatively perverse that the film hangs out on the sidelines, only briefly entering the midst of the event itself. Despite the borderline creepy-cool and eternal smiling of Woodstock co-creator Michael Lang (Jonathan Groff), the festival is rife with insufficient ticketing and food, a sea of parked cars that kill the New York Thruway and a torrential downpour. Then there are the moments where it looked like mass electrocution was possible. For the most part Taking Woodstock acts as welcome revisionist history, with Lee vying to be Robert Altman or Mike Leigh in Topsy-Turvy mode. It’s an inspired idea.

What’s not inspired is attaching the film to Elliot Tiber, or at least Demetri Martin. Asked to be the calm against the storm or, less charitably, the boring guy amidst a maelstrom of freaks and egos, Martin downplays his deadpan shtick and the result is an expressionless charisma vacuum.

Time and time again, interesting characters weave in and out of the film—from Liev Schreiber’s gun-toting tranny to Levy’s subtly cunning Yasgur to Emile Hirsch’s hammy vet­—and invariably you wish the film would start shifting perspective, Slacker-style. Instead, we’re stuck with Martin and his surreally banal family troubles and his tyrannical cartoon of a mother (Imelda Staunton, apparently convinced she’s in a flat-out comedy), so much so that the interesting parts of the movie are eclipsed by bullshit. Now Taking Altamont—even Lee couldn’t muck that up. C

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