I have great admiration for Ang Lee. He makes movies for grown-ups: moving, thought-provoking and entertaining. So I must give him a lot of leeway with his latest, Taking Woodstock. It isn’t a bad movie – I think he is probably incapable of that – but as a dramatic feature it’s a bit of a fizzle.
The problem is Woodstock itself. It becomes the main character in the movie and, as such, there’s no dramatic arc. It’s almost like a documentary. We know exactly what will happen – the show will be an acid-tripping, rain-soaked success – so the conflicts of the actual characters become completely ancillary.
Because I recently attended an anniversary screening of A Walk on the Moon, written by my dear friend, Pamela Gray, I couldn’t help mentally comparing the two movies as I sat in the cinema. Even factoring in my personal allegiance to Pam, Taking Woodstock came up way short.
Both are set in the Catskills during the summer of 1969, and both involve a lower middle class Jewish family struggling to make ends meet, seemingly oblivious to the cultural crisis reaching a crescendo. The movies even utilize identical newsreel footage, e.g. of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon and of the New York State Thruway turned into a hippie parking lot. But because Woodstock never threatened to become a main character in A Walk on the Moon, the conflicts of the human characters remained paramount and we were left genuinely in doubt about the life-altering choices they will make.
Ang Lee must have recognized this risk when he made his film, and Elliot, the main character, is so likeable (played by the comedian Demetri Martin) that one is tempted to give Lee a pass. I missed the actual music festival – I was 8 years old and living on the West Coast – so I have no way of knowing if the mythology of Woodstock, of the carefree, happy hippies camped out in Yasgur’s farm, matches up with the reality. I mean, with all that rain and lack of food, there must have been some bummed out dudes. But regardless, Lee feels the need to give Elliot the burden of not just immigrant parents who won’t let him go, but also being a closet homosexual. The problem is that Lee handled this much more sensitively and thoroughly in Brokeback Mountain. Without Jimi Hendrix and Joan Baez et al getting in the way, the tragic tale of two cowboys wrestling with their sexual orientation raised some serious dramatic stakes. The closest Taking Woodstock comes to bringing us to the edge of our seat is whether the amplification system will electrocute someone, owing to the incessant rainstorms.
One almost wonders what kind of a movie it would have been if played for laughs. There is some humor, to be sure, most of it thanks to a wonderful cameo turn by Liev Schreiber as a cross-dressing security guard who hires himself out to Elliot’s family. (They run the motel that serves as Woodstock HQ and Elliot finagles the permit that gets the festival onto a neighbor’s farm.) The fact that Schreiber, in A Walk on the Moon, played Diane Lane’s straight-arrow husband who is cuckolded by the hippie Viggo Mortensen, is pure poetic irony. Schreiber, a big burly guy, steals the show in his wig, pumps and frocks, but he’s completely believable: he’s actually the only character in the movie who knows who he is and is comfortable showing it. But apart from Schreiber’s Vilma, the rest of the characters unfortunately fail Somerset Maugham’s famous test of three-dimensionality.
Sorry, man – I don’t mean to be such a major bummer.
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