Taking Woodstock

2009. Dir: Ang Lee. Starring: Demetri Martin, Imelda Staunton, Henry Goodman, Liev Schreiber and Emile Hirsch. ●●●○○



Taking Woodstock is a pleasant diversion, it allows you to drift back to a past you don't really remember and experience it all over again without investing yourself emotionally. To the characters Woodstock is something that happens around them, a force greater than gravity that they can merely allow to flow over them.

The story follows Elliot Tiber (an excellent Demetri Martin) as he attempts to rescue his parents motel by brokering a deal between the organisers of the Woodstock festival and a local land owner. We meet his emotional mother (Imelda Staunton) and his put upon father (Henry Goodman), his neighbours (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Emile Hirsch and Eugene Levy) and finally the festival organisers and hangers on.


Generally Tiber is in awe of these people, emotionally free and with the confidence to plan such an event, and spend all day in leather waistcoats. It becomes clear that Tiber is an outsider, desperate to forge ahead with his own life but shackeled to the run down motel.

The second act concerns the preparations for the festival from the moment the booking is made to the realisation that this festival will be bigger and more memorable than anyone can imagine. It is hard to believe now that the freeway was effectively closed from Manhattan island all the way to upstate New York, or that this concert changed counterculture forever both being the highlight of the hippie era and marking the first step of it's downfall.

Watching the film you can identify with the first, we are shown repeated scenes of traffic james, however due to the nature of the narrative, from seeing the events unfold from Tiber's largely passive eyes, we can only surmise at the latter. Tiber doesn't even make it to the stage. He spends the first two nights tripping with random hippies and taking pot with his parents. The third day was, of course, a wash out of enormous proportions - we do spend some time sliding in the mud to prove it.

Individual scenes are brilliant. The Earthlight production of Chekhov's Three Sisters is a surreal delight, and the final conversation between Tiber and his father as they skirt around the issues of Elliot's sexuality and his mother's erratic behaviour is artfully written.

I just wish this could have melded with the whole better, or that we left the cinema with a better understanding of how the world changed that summer.