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Taking Woodstock: Missing the Music and the Moment

“Didn’t you kill tons of Nazi’s and go crazy in your last film?”

“Yep, I’ve got what film people refer to as “range”.”

Rating: 4 out of 10

Anytime you step into the world of “based on true events” or choosing to fictionalize a story set inside a real life moment in time, you had better be ready to defend your choices. Real life moments mean real people lived them, maybe not the exact ones being portrayed on screen, but close facsimiles and they love nothing more than relating how many details you got wrong when trying to recreate the feelings and nostalgia from way back when. A great number of movies that fall into this category are saved by the sheer amount of years between now and then, thereby eliminating their detractors, but choosing anything that took place from the 1920s onward and you will likely find someone spinning a tale in direct opposition to your own. And how can you dismiss it? They were there! The danger gets exponentially bigger when you choose something the size of Woodstock, where over one-and-a-half million people descended on this small town to bear witness to the musical representation of peace, love and the new generation in America. It was something parents screamed and railed to keep their kids from going to, yet those kids grew up to tell and retell their own children about why they went and the magic they experienced at one of the greatest music festivals of all time. Many movies have tried to capture the emotional content of Woodstock and no one seemed primed to do it better than the master of mood and emotion, Ang Lee.

Taking Woodstock tells a small story inside of an extremely large moment. Elliot Tiber is the dutiful son, living in the big city, but sending all his money home to his parents and their dilapidated motel. Year after year he returns in the summer to help bring in the meager amount of tourist business, but this particular summer, while on the verge of bankruptcy, Elliot hears of a music festival in desperate need of a location to land. On the run from town after town of narrow minded and fearful locals, the hippie festival known as Woodstock needed a new home and Elliot saw a flower-powered flashlight dancing at the end of his lifelong tunnel.

Ang Lee said in an interview he wanted to tell this story because he was tired and drained by the emotionally heavy subjects he tackled in his recent films, like Brokeback Mountain and Lust, Caution. Lee wanted something happy, full of hope and felt the need to remind us how over a million people came together in overwhelmingly terrible conditions and lived together for three days without a single instance of violence reported. There was an aura over the crowd, a group connection which connected and combined the hearts and minds of those in attendance. Yet he made very clear that this was not a documentary about the music, since those have been done before. This was solely about the people and the effect the concert had on them.

With that intention in mind Lee pulled together a wide swatch of personal storylines, beginning with Tiber, but radiating outwards to include his parents, the locals, old semi-acquaintances from his youth, a politically radical theatre troupe living in his barn, and just to top it all off, a cross dressing ex-marine-cum-personal security officer. Many, but not all, of these were intensely interesting characters and situations, but Lee’s failure was trying to include all in one film. Any of these alone could have been enough to give breadth and emotional focus to Woodstock and the effect it had on that one person, but all together it dragged the film down and created a tangled web of people with no real conclusion or specific journey.

[Minor SPOILER below. And even though it sounds major, it plays out as minor]

In one example where Lee made things overcomplicated is with the main character, Elliot Tiber, where he not only had to deal with his parents odd personalities, their failing motel and the overwhelming stress brought on by trying to host Woodstock, it turns out he was also trying to hide his homosexuality. Something as large as this should have been explored more and brought to the forefront of who Tiber was, but it ended up just another unfinished element in an increasingly congested landscape of characters.

[SPOILER over. Continue reading unafraid.]

With the issues inherent in the script, I found it hard for the actors to really reach their full potential inside these roles. Demetri Martin, someone I think is single-handedly pushing the forefront of comedy, gave a decent performance, resting comfortably in his inherent awkwardness, but he didn’t grow with the character and failed to end the movie a believably stronger person than when he began. Emile Hirsch, one of the strongest actors in his age range, also portrayed a nice mixture of pain and longing from the vantage point of someone only recently returning from the Vietnam war. Unfortunately he also suffered from never truly being explored and remained only a tertiary character on the sidelines of the story. The one person able to actually break through the haze of character cross-pollination was Liev Schreiber, who actually got one of the most odd and at first seemingly insignificant characters in the film, Vilma, the cross dressing ex-marine. Schreiber became the voice of reason, the old wise man/woman inside this drug-induced wonderland of freaks and flower children. He also seemed to pull through because he was the only person who had a real sense of self and a solid belief in what they wanted out of life. Understandably you can’t have the main character like that because there would be no drama, no conflict, no confusion, but it was a welcome relief to have at least one person on a clear path through the wilderness of the Sixties.

The last thing I want to mention is Elliot’s parents: An old world couple which originally played nicely against his modern-sixties lifestyle in the big city and the commonplace fear of the oncoming hippie generation. While the father gets a small arc and gains some much needed perspective on the world, the mother not only fails to learn any type of lesson throughout the film, but remains an irredeemably negative influence on Elliot. Both actors, Henry Goodman (dad) and Imelda Staunton (mom), play their parts quite well, but the failure to allow them to amount to anything holds back any true appreciation.

The End of the Page recommendation: I still remain a fan of Ang Lee and feel he is a master at creating mood and environment, but here he proves that those elements become moot without a compelling and satisfying story to pull it all together. For those looking for a feel-good movie about the effects of a generation of music, try Almost Famous or Velvet Goldmine.

Rachel Getting Married: Performances Outpace Story

I remember what it was like to blink. Those were good days.

In every actor’s career there comes a moment where the critics and audiences rally around jumping for joy about how they’ve just witnessed a breakthrough performance. As stunning as these performances are, the term “breakthrough” always felt a little out of place to me since it’s only on rare occasions the actor in question is relatively new. Most times they are people who have been pounding the boards and scraping the screen for years. In those terms, the breakthrough is nothing more than a large group of people seeing that actor in a new light for the first time, mostly in something they never imagined before. Now the newly colored spotlight falls on Anne Hathaway and her powerful turn as Kym in Rachel’s Getting Married.

The film is a slice of life piece detailing a small space of time, only a few days, where Kym returns home from a rehab clinic just in time for her sister Rachel’s wedding. Anyone who has ever taken part in arranging a wedding, especially one taking place in the family home, knows the extreme stress already present, so toss a young, partially unstable girl into the mix and top it off with a nice coating of family denial and dark skeletons in the hallway closet, then you get the full picture of this film. Relationships are strained, ties pulled so tight and taut they could snap and still they try to work it out through screaming, laughing and crying (not necessarily in that order). After all, it’s about a wedding, who’s not happy at those?

Before giving Anne her due credit, let me shed some light on someone most people won’t know off the top of their heads. Rosemarie DeWitt plays the title role of Rachel and she does it with the utmost tenderness and subtlety. What she brings across is the inherent hatred, resentment and unending compassion sisters can feel for each other, even through the worst of storms. With a film more comfortable in the category of “ensemble piece”, Rosemarie is the catalyst and pushes the energy along, changing and charging every one of her scenes. But the light shines brightest on Anne Hathaway as Kym, the ex-junkie, ex-alcoholic, ex-return rehab patient bordering on becoming an ex-family member. Audiences claim this as a breakthrough performance because they fell in love with Anne in The Princess Diaries movies, Ella Enchanted and the wonderfully wicked The Devil Wears Prada. Yet what they might not remember is she’s played rougher, tougher roles in Havoc and Brokeback Mountain, showing the more mature and adult side of her skills. So I wasn’t all that shocked to witness the brilliance she brought to this film, but I will celebrate it all the same. Anne jumps in and exposes a vulnerability, a cavern of pain and lost love, which drives the emotional core of the picture. From opening credits to the closing moment, she is the elephant in the room everyone must deal with and the magical point is this is the first time where the audience can begin to empathize with the elephant and not the onlookers. I can’t end the acting portion of this review without bringing up Bill Irwin and Debra Winger as well. Bill plays her father and churns out a tenderness only an accomplished actor such as himself could generate. There are such small moments, such tiny fractures in his facade which allow you to peer into the heart of a man trying to choose between his greatest love and his greatest loss. On the other side, Debra Winger plays her mother, who has chosen to block out the pain in her past and skate by the rest of her life, allowing the blackness and hurt to fester and suffocate any chance at a real connection with her daughters. As you can read, the acting on display here is sensational and will undoubtedly be remembered during awards season.

As a total film, I’m not sure the story reaches the same heights. A lot of great scenes and spectacular moments are created, but the story lacks cohesion. A particular subplot about the family and its deep love for music is mentioned and referred to over and over, but never fully explained or explored, which weighs down later scenes during the wedding celebration and the overlong musical sequences. During most of the musical moments, all I really wanted was to get back to the story, back to the family and to Kym. Also, the connection between Rosemarie and her soon-to-be husband Sydney (played by Tunde Adebimpe) never quite comes across. There is a wonderful moment during their wedding vows, but it could have been helped even more if their relationship had been more centered earlier on.

On the directing front, Jonathan Demme, with the assistance of a touchingly tender script from Jenny Lumet, helps craft a reality we can all believe in, a home we can all feel we’ve been to before. Much of this intimacy and nuance came from the free form style of camera movement, with the actors never knowing where and when the camera was going to appear on them. Everyone was basically playing everything from the moment he yelled action, so there were emotional surprises around every pan of the camera. That technique gave the movie a certain level of improv or even documentary feeling, like the audience was the most silent of voyeurs.

Recommendation: A powerful series of moments, filled with terrific acting, that don’t quite come together as a film. Certainly has great value to witness, but the theater experience might not be necessary. Also, this really is meant for those viewers not afraid to open themselves up to it.

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