Since Ice Storm in 1995, Taiwan-born director Ang Lee (李安) has made a number of forays in Americana. Taking Woodstock, a comedy about the massive concert-cum-happening that defined a generation, has, of all these films, with the possible exception of the Marvel Comics adaptation Hulk (2003), the broadest appeal. It is also likely to disappoint on a number of fronts, particularly its dearth of generation-defining music.
Lee takes as his starting point the character of Elliot Tiber (Demetri Martin), a small-town boy who for better or worse believes that it is his duty to help out his curmudgeonly parents who own a motel in the Catskills. Tiber is a real person, and his book, Taking Woodstock: A True Story of a Riot, a Concert and a Life, was the inspiration for this film, and as portrayed by Marin, is, despite all his good qualities, something of a charisma vacuum. It is a mark of Lee’s genius that he is able to use this negative energy to magnificent effect. In Taking Woodstock, Tiber is the eye of the storm around which the tumult happens. He drops acid and has casual sex, but he remains an outsider, brushed by great events, but getting on with his own rather insignificant life despite it all.
Taking Woodstock could all too easily have become yet another earnest exploration of a small niche of American life, and the slow opening, setting up Tiber’s dysfunctional relationship with his parents and his own uncertainty about his future, suggested as much. A 1960s version of The Ice Storm loomed, but then a desperate idea to avert financial ruin brings Michael Lang (Jonathan Groff) and his crew of musical impresarios into town, and spectacular chaos ensues.
Many of the ideas that were generated by 1960s counterculture are still very much with us, and while many were directly touched by its magic, many, many more absorbed its effects indirectly, second or third hand. It is to this vast multitude, rather than the linear descendants of the flower children, the fans of Dylan and Hendrix, to whom Lee speaks, which may go some way to explaining the rather muted part music plays in the film.
Tiber is the catalyst that brings the Woodstock festival to Max Yasgur’s (Eugene Levy) farm near the town of Bethel, New York. Apart from the vast hippie crowd, there were the music impresarios of Woodstock Ventures, who were also out to make money from the event. In a number of sequences, Lee plays off the laid-back, go-with-the-flow mythology of Woodstock against the hardheaded capitalism that got the ball rolling in the first place.
Lee brings a very light touch to Taking Woodstock, happy to allow comedy to dominate, but managing to let the darker currents of that era occasionally peep through the surface.
It’s been 14 years since Sense and Sensibility (1995), and one had all but forgotten how skilled Lee can be at handling lightly comic situations. In Taking Woodstock, Lee pokes fun at Tiber, the flower children and the conservatism of Middle America, but does so without rancor, and more importantly, without out (much) caricature.
The casting of Henry Goodman and Imelda Staunton, two English actors, as Tiber’s parents is rather peculiar, and though Goodman slips into his role with relative ease, Staunton, fine actor though she is, works far too hard, and sometimes verges on becoming a character from Benny Hill. The cast is enlivened by the appearance of Liev Schreiber as Vilma, a cross-dressing ex-Marine who provides security at Tiber’s motel when the crowds start pouring in, and by Mamie Gummer as Tisha, an assistant to the Woodstock Ventures capitalists, who sees things as they really are through her spaced-out thousand-mile stare.
Taking Woodstock is not about a concert, or indeed is it particularly about social change or the emergence of a new era. Its social commentary is lightweight, though deftly handled, but it is solidly about what Ang Lee has always made films about: relationships and self-awareness. Tiber’s character, alas, doesn’t grow a whole lot, which means the film peters out somewhat, rather like the anticlimax that follows after too much partying.
The film ends with Lang hinting that he would be helping organize another concert, this time at Altamont. Peace and love are all very well, but Lee is well aware that there is another side to that coin.
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