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.
DandyID
Facebook
Twitter