 "Photo: MCT campus")
A little over forty years ago, a musical revolution occurred in a humble upstate New York venue tucked in the countryside of the Catskills, simply titled Woodstock. It is the pinnacle of all music festivals and has since become the template for so many to follow. And yet it seems none will never quite measure up the profound reverberations left in those muddy hills. Names you might be familiar with such as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and The Who graced the stage in front of a massive crowd of over a half a million hippies who considered this concert to be a spiritual pilgrimage of sorts, a place where music played through the day and night, drugs were abundant, and peace reigned supreme.
In the film "Taking Woodstock" from Oscar-winning director Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain), the origins of the concert and how it snowballed into a cultural snapshot of a lost generation are explored through the eyes of a failed interior designer Elliot Teichberg. Elliot (played by Demetri Martin) inadvertently finds himself a key player in bringing Woodstock to his small town, White Lake, New York.
Coming back from New York City for the summer nearly flat broke, Elliot must tend to his parents' decaying El Monaco hotel that is facing foreclosure. Desperate to save the hotel he enlists a theater troupe to do performances on the premises and he renews his permit to have a small music and arts festival that normally consists of local bands and records played over a PA system all in an attempt to attract much-needed tourists to the area. When a nearby town protests against having the already planned Woodstock festival, (mainly due to the fear of a thieving hippie invasion), Elliot decides to use his vaguely written and more importantly approved concert permit to persuade concert producer Michael Lang to bring his festival to White Lake.
The rest of the film then explores the development of the concert (turning a dairy farm into a concert venue and turning the El Monaco hotel into the organizer's headquarters).
It's in this development stage that things start to sag in the film as tensions run high with neighbors who are completely ignorant of the true behaviors of hippies and there seems to be too many scenes of business meetings that could have easily been summated in one compact scene.
On a more positive note the film is incredibly successful at bottling up the energy and spirit of 1969 in a time capsule by keeping the comedy carefree and simple (drug jokes, classic miscommunications, and pratfalls of culture clashing). And yet it also tackles deeper issues of the era, namely Vietnam, through Emile Hirsch's character Billy who struggles with PTSD when returning home from war. Hirsch clocks in another solid performance with his manic interpretation of a man whose mind can easily drift into battle at any given moment.
The always impressive Liev Schreiber takes on the role of Vilma, a transvestite Elliot enlists as security for the hotel.
Schreiber's Vilma may be a supporting role and yet his relaxed performance plays off well against Martin's strained Elliot whose character is self-conscious about coming out to his parents, and when you consider how judgmental his mother is you can't seem to blame him. But Schreiber's Vilma pushes Elliot in the right direction of accepting yourself and being comfortable in your own shoes without really saying the words, she simply leads by example.
With all of these characters in place the hippies begin to arrive in droves and it is then when the film really finds its footing after a hit-or-miss exposition. The film begins to flow easily from scene to scene in the same spirit as hippies flow freely into town. Lee often breaks up the screen to give us a view of the festival from all angles at once immersing the audience into the moment and using a unique method to do so.
Furthermore the tense drama between the town and the organizers takes a backseat to the comedy that only drugs can induce. Paul Dano (Little Miss Sunshine) makes a memorable appearance in the film as one half of a hippie couple that introduces Elliot to acid. That then leads into a hilarious tripped out sequence where the crowd is literally swimming according to Elliot's eyes.
The film has great sense of optimism that is only fitting for a true-to-life coming of age story that just so happens to be set against the backdrop of the most important musical event perhaps of all time.
Be the first to comment on this article!