Taking Woodstock (2009)
Content by Tony Macklin. Originally published on August 28, 2009 @ tonymacklin.net.
Taking Woodstock tells a story about the monumental, historic music happening on Max Yasgur's dairy farm in the Catskills in 1969.
The movie is homogenized mud.
Director Ang Lee slides all over the place. He takes away all the sharp edges; what is left is pretty much a mess.
Taking Woodstock is a kind of feel-good movie. Kind of. But the sit-com elements keep it stuck in the mire. I can see Taking Woodstock made into a bad tv situation comedy. The Age of Aquarius is dead; the Age of Shtik never dies.
Ang Lee is often a first-rate director; he won an Oscar for directing Brokeback Mountain (2005). There he had an effective screenplay which won an Oscar for Adapted Screenplay.
With Taking Woodstock, Lee labors with a mediocre script by James Schamus from a book that Elliot Teichberg wrote (under the pseudonym Elliot Tiber) with Tom Monte.
The screenplay lops ten years off the 34-year old Elliot's age, and -- shazam! -- it instantly becomes a coming of age story. But it still has the creaky sensibility of coming of middle age. It's like Tom Brokaw looking back at the '60s.
Taking Woodstock is the story of a "young" man Elliot Teichberg (Demetri Martin), who has come home to upstate New York to try to help his parents keep open their failing, ramshackle motel. His father Jake (Henry Goodman) is repressed, and his mother Sonia (Imelda Staunton) is a harpy.
Elliot has a permit which allows the concert to find a home. Taking Woodstock is about the trials and tribulations of bringing the fabled event to fruition. Meanwhile Elliot is finding himself.
What most bogs down Taking Woodstock is that schlocky screenwriter Schamus is dealing with mom issues. The mother seems to come from another movie. She makes Marie Barone (Everybody Loves Raymond) seem serene.
The mother in Taking Woodstock is the Mother of all Odium. She is racist, bigoted, greedy, shrill, and loudmouthed. What's not to love?
I assume she may scare the bejesus out of some mother-dominated souls in the audience. When her husband tells Elliot that he has stayed with her because he "loves" her, the audience collectively goes, "huh?"
She's a rabid cow.
While very unfortunate in his screenwriter, Ang Lee is fortunate in his cast. Demetri Martin is earnest and vulnerable as the put-upon Elliot, and Liev Schreiber is terrific as the cross-dressing ex-marine Vilma.
Jonathan Groff is appealing as a hippie entrepreneur, who keeps the project on its wayward course. Emile Hirsch plays a hyper Vietnam vet. And Marie Gummer -- Merle Streep's daughter -- is winsome as an earth-loving girl.
Imelda Staunton, who was a mean-spirited teacher in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007), is registering the patent on mean with Sonia.
One wonders what director Milos Forman would have done with the materials of Taking Woodstock. Forman always is potently humanistic in his vision and execution -- e.g., Hair (1979). Forman never would allow the mother to descend to the caterwauling figure Lee does.
Ang Lee tries to be humanistic, but he winds up playing games -- poker, bridge, slapjack. He can't decide which card to play.
Taking Woodstock takes both the value and the spirit out of an historic event
Taking Woodstock is two movies. One tries to be a warm glow about Woodstock. The other is post-adolescent prattle.
Woodstock was never prattle.
