Culture Revolutions of an American Kind
Written: Sep 09 '09
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Product Rating:
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| Bang For The Buck |
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Pros: sweet, poignant, sweeping, well-acted and directed
Cons: a little Disneyesque
The Bottom Line: This somewhat safe rendition of what happened at Woodstock is still good fun.
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| bilavideo's Full Review: Taking Woodstock |
Arriving in time for the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love, Taking Woodstock takes us back but with rose-colored glasses. Ang Lee's film, about a young man who saves the greatest party of a generation - and is transformed by it - is the definition of revisionist history. It's less about what actually happened than about what it means to us now. Even at this stage, Woodstock has long since entered the consciousness of American popculture. In mythologizing the moment, Ang Lee is following a pattern left behind by Shakespeare - and the writers of the Bible. But in telling this story through the eyes of a single observer, Lee has made it smaller and more personal. Whether this is a paradigm that works is anybody's guess. Sometimes you get Titanic. Sometimes you get Pearl Harbor.
Elliot Tiber (Demetri Martin) is a young man living in the Catskills with his aging parents, Jake and Sonia Teichtberg (Henry Goodman and Imelda Staunton). The three of them run a motel that's on its last leg. An overdue mortgage provides the motive for enterprise. Elliot, who serves as president of the area's makeshift development board, reflects the burdens of the "silent generation." He spends his every lonely day trying to save the motel and a community feeling the pinch of the times. On the other hand, the naked people in his barn attest to another side of the man. Open to the avant garde, Elliot hosts a yearly culture fair, an artsy-fartsy cultural revolution, one made harmless by the community's indifference. Containment in the barn is a great metaphor, both in terms of revealing Eliot's inner life as well as its containment.
But things change.
Pressed for a solution, Elliot intervenes when "Woodstock" gets kicked out of Woodstock. The concert that changed history almost never was as local communities shut their doors to the hippie onslaught. With a permit already granted for his yearly culture fair, Elliot invites promoters in while interesting a neighboring landowner, Max Yasgur (Eugene Levy) to sit down with them. Emile Hirsch turns in one of the film's most iconic (albeit briefest) roles, that of Billy, an old neighborhood pal reinvented as the world's most charismatic hippie. Functionally, Billy serves as a reminder that Woodstock didn't just happen; it was an organized effort, even if the result came off as organized chaos. Behind the scenes, a lot of wheels were greased, a lot of money spent, to keep the dream alive against death from a thousand cuts. But symbolically, Billy serves a higher role, that of the hippie consciousness calling out to Elliot.
Throughout this film, Elliot's attempts to get this party started are happening in conjunction with his own decision to join the party or let the parade pass on.
Much of Taking Woodstock involves the many behind-the-scenes battles that would determine the outcome of history. In that regard, we get a sense of the opposition engendered by the prospect of a hippie pilgrimmage into upstate New York. But, like the revolution in Elliot's barn, this opposition is safely contained. Time has tempered our consciousness of the battlelines and the shrieking hostility between the two sides. Mind you, I was only three when Woodstock happened, but my childhood memories are tattoed with the arguments and fights and squabbles and demonization on both sides. If you want a better sense of the real emotions of the period, rent 1971's Billy Jack. I suspect one reason for the Disneyesque memory loss is the reality that many of the boomers are, themselves, entering retirement - with their parents on death's door or walking through it. By the time Clinton began feeling our pain, boomers were already deep in rapprochement with their parents - and vice versa. So maybe it's impolite to be too frank.
Perhaps the most ironic omission is of the concert itself. Based on the book, Taking Woodstock, by Elliot Tiber (born Elliot Teichberg) and Tom Monte, Ang Lee's film has little interest in the actual lineup of the concert of the century. While we get a reminder, through dialogue, of who was there - including Joan Baez, Country Joe McDonald, Santana, The Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin, Sly & the Family Stone, The Who, Jefferson Airplane, Joe Cocker, Country Joe and the Fish, Blood Sweat and Tears, Crosby Stills and Nash, Sha-Na-Na and Jimi Hendrix - Ang Lee bends over backwards to avoid making a concert film. To be sure, he has good reasons to do so. Four decades after the event, it's impossible for today's generation to get a full sense of what it meant to have all those groups together over a three-day weekend. Musical styles have changed. There are also logistical considerations in deciding what groups to use and how to use them. Would it have made this a better film if Lee had included more documentary footage, or had casted cover bands to fake it up in style? Whatever the case, it still feels weird to have a movie about the concert of the century, but shot from a distance, as if it were an alien landing from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
What Lee does get right is to remind an older generation, and alert their spawn, to the miracle at White Lake. Never had their been a concert quite like this, nor ever in the four decades since. Thousands of young people trekked across a continent, and some from around the world, to see an all-star line-up of some of the best acts in music. They sold thousands of tickets for what would end up being a free concert in the middle of nowhere. The pilgrimmage itself so clogged the highways that Governor Nelson Rockefeller declared it a state of emergency and nearly called out 10,000 national guardsmen (a response whose dangers would be discovered two years later at the Kent State Massacre). Stacking up the implausibles, it's hard to believe that Woodstock ever happened. Lee's accomplishment is to resurrect the dead and bring the concert back to life, as well as to tell this story in a loving, forgiving, way. The story of what "those hippies" did to upstate New York, and what "those locals" did in response, has become - in its own Disneyesque way - the story of "us."
Note: There's actually a controversy over Elliot Tiber's book with others suggesting he had little, if anything, to do with moving Woodstock to White Lake. That controversy is rendered somewhat irrelevant by screenwriter James Schamus (The Ice Storm, Hulk, Lust Caution), who uses Elliot Tiber's story as a convenient parable through which to discuss how Woodstock stood for the counterculture and its eventual romance with a whole generation. By the time we got to the seventies, the roles would reverse, with kids dropping out of it while their elders finally dropped in. Woodstock would end up holding a special place in the public imagination, especially when compared to the next free concert: Altamont.
Recommended:
Yes
Movie Mood: Feel-good Movie
Viewing Method: Other
Film Completeness: Looked complete to me.
Worst Part of this Film: Nothing
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