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Taking Woodstock. Dir. by Ang Lee. Prod, by Ang Lee and James Schamus. Focus Features, 2009. 120 mins. (http://focusfeatures.com/ film/taking_woodstock)
For forty years, Woodstock has been a Rorschach test for 1960s culture. For those who were there, actually and metaphorically, the festival was "history's largest happening," the flowering of an Age of Aquarius, an invitation to freedom, autonomy, and authenticity. For those who were not, it was, as a writer for Time magazine opined, "a squalid freakout, a monstrous Dionysian revel, where a mob of crazies gathered to drop acid and groove to hours of amplified cacophony" (Aug. 29, 1969). "What kind of culture is it that can produce so colossal a mess?" asked the editors of the New York Times (Aug. 18, 1969). Woodstock, of course, turned out to be less than it appeared to be in 1969 to both celebrants and critics. But it has remained iconic, its significance contested terrain.
In Taking Woodstock, based on Elliot Tiber's 2007 book by the same name, the screenwriter James Schamus and director Ang Lee use the festival as a backdrop to grind two axioms that, for better and worse, come straight out ofthe 1960s. Despite the antimaterialistic rhetoric of flower children, "the whole thing," they remind us, was (and is) about commerce. Whether you are old or young, black or white, gay or straight, they also want us to remember, if you know who you are, life will be easier for you and everybody else. The film, alas, does not nuance these jams. It does not really illuminate Elliot's struggle for identity or the greed that animates just about everyone around him. Its characters, especially Elliots parents and Billy, the Vietnam War veteran, are stereotypes. Taking Woodstock, alas, is a trip that is not worth taking.
At the center of the film, Elliot Teichberg (Demetri Martin) emerges as the improbable...