Taking Woodstock Review

Ang Lee, whose award-winning Brokeback Mountain nudged Hollywood's closet door a little further open, presents an extraordinarily un-dynamic coming-of-age comedy-drama about preparations for the epic 1969 music festival in upstate New York, at which Hendrix, Janis Joplin and The Who all played. Not that you'd ever know it. Lee's exercise in fake nostalgia is set so far behind the scenes that it's practically happening in Canada, and every blunted cliche about hippies, free love, drugs and revolution is rolled up and sucked dry by a screenplay which, to borrow a line from Stevie Winwood's song on the soundtrack, can't find its way home.

Elliot Tiber (Demetri Martin) is a young NY interior designer who returns home to help his parents (Henry Goodman and Imelda Staunton) at their decrepit Catskills motel. When he hears that hippie entrepreneur Michael Lang (Jonathan Groff) and his wealthy backers need somewhere to stage their postponed festival asap, Elliot and local landowner Max Yasgur (Eugene Levy) offer their services. The cash comes pouring in, rehabilitating Elliot's family business and invigorating the local economy. But not everyone in the town wants to see half a million hippies rolling around in the grass, and the logistics of the enterprise are significantly less than meticulous.

Adapted from the memoir by the real-life Elliot Tiber, Taking Woodstock aims to tell the story of an entire generation by focussing on a single face in the crowd. But rather than proving a canny point of entry to the counterculture's greatest story, Lee's film drifts down a rocky path to nowhere. Elliot, along with flashbacking Vietnam Vet Billy (Emile Hirsch), cross-dressing ex-Marine Vilma (Liev Schreiber) and Elliot's own put-upon father Jake are all sent off on their own carefully mapped out voyages of self-discovery. Maybe there's something in the water up there in the Catskills, but Lee's opening half-hour drags its heels as if treading through festival mud and the nods towards small-town satire (the genteel folk of Woodstock are revealed to be unpleasantly anti-Semitic) are promptly undone by Imelda Staunton as Elliot's avaricious Jewish mother.