Mamie Gummer (left), Jonathan Groff (center) and Demetri Martin star in Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock
It is impossible to know whether Ang Lee ever specifically read Neil Young’s widely-quoted comment about an infamous 1969 music festival: “Woodstock was a bullshit gig, a piece of shit. We played f—ing awful. No one was into the music.” But it is clear Lee has internalized every word of the backlash against the seminal three days of love, music and peace.
In fact, Lee believes critics like Young so much his movie about Woodstock isn’t filled with free love, but instead stuffed with oppressive self-loathing. Taking Woodstock is a film in moral anguish, dying to be about anything other than Woodstock and those damn, lazy, hygiene-lacking hippies nobody really likes anymore.
Lee chooses a number of prisms through which to study the phenomenon, the chief and most charming one being a closeted and humble young Jew named Elliot (Demetri Martin, Paper Heart) who is responsible for bringing the festival to sleepy White Lake, N.Y. Martin underplays his performance just right, recalling that long lineage of illustrious quiet, wounded, gay cowboys that once earned Lee an Academy Award.
As for Lee himself, he is not quite so subtle. He views conflicts with all the vigor of an anthropologist, and a cliche-loving one at that. First, there is the easy one: Elliot’s duties to his subservient father (Henry Goodman, Green Street Hooligans) and a shrill, greedy, commandeering shrew in the stereotype of a Jewish mother (Imelda Staunton, A Bunch of Amateurs).
They pull, he pushes and we’re left standing in the margins of one of Vietnam-era America’s most significant events, observing a dutiful struggle to reconcile family and figure out who he really is.
Elliot, after convincing his greedy parents to envision all the dollars to be gained by riding this hippie thing out, teams up with his Jewish neighbor and chief landowner Max (Eugene Levy, Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, in a career-redeeming turn) to lease land to Woodstock Ventures, no matter what the blue-collar town Protestants say about it.
Lee is fairly adept at throwing barbs from each side of the issue to achieve some measure of balance. The rednecks worry the hippies will “rape the cattle” and the film also exposes the downright sinister capitalism underpinning Woodstock Ventures.
He even throws in a traumatized Vietnam veteran, Billy (a surprisingly campy Emile Hirsch, Milk), but doesn’t exactly approach Deer Hunter levels. Instead, Billy is by far the silliest character in the film, with Hirsch running around naked in mud and doing a crazed impression of a vet that is equal parts parody and genuine emotion.
Therein lies the rub. You can look at Woodstock through sociological lenses until your eyes bleed. But what Lee is really doing, to put it less charitably, is refusing to touch the movement with a 10-foot pole, lest the stench of the hippies afflict his film.
When Lee puts his visual smarts on the ground, knee-deep in the mud, acid and colorful vans, he is actually quite inspiring. A gorgeous aerial shot of the masses turns into a deep, dark ocean in Elliot’s acid-colored eyes. By the end, one reaches the point of wishing for a character to imbibe psychedelic drugs so Lee can break out his straitjacket and truly capture the cultural rumblings.
We live in an era when Eric Cartman can be cheered on for drilling through a mass of hippies on South Park and politicians state they did not inhale. It’s a shame Lee could not see past our current cultural hang-ups regarding the era and just, like, dig it man.
vmain13@umdbk.com
RATING: 2 out of 5 Stars
