Taking Woodstock

City Paper Grade: C+

by Cindy Fuchs

SUMMER OF '69: Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock, starring Demetri Martin, is an uncomplicated caricature of the era.

It's summer in the Catskills, 1969. The air is hot, the weeds are colorful, the lawn ornaments cutesy and the roadside hotels plentiful. At the beginning of Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock, the season looks pretty much as it always has for Elliot (Demetri Martin), who has for too long helped his parents run motel El Monaco.

Once again pleading their case to the bank manager — asking for just two more months to avoid foreclosure — Elliot reflects a mix of affection and embarrassment. He tries to look professional as his mother, Sonia (Imelda Staunton), insists she is again being persecuted, on top of the horrors of "walking from Russia" to escape the pogroms, while his father, Jake (Henry Goodman), can only slink into his chair and sigh. For yet another summer, Elliot gives up his dream of moving to San Francisco or even pursuing his own ambitions as an artist, in order to clean rooms and paint signs ("Swim at your own risk").

And then, according to the fantasy of the film and much history, everything changes: Acting as chairman of the town council, Elliot grants Michael Lang (Jonathan Groff) a permit to hold a music festival, then finds a location, as well — the farm of Max Yasgur (Eugene Levy). Suddenly the town is filled with outsiders, building a stage, setting up sound equipment and taking all kinds of drugs. Locals are at once horrified and grateful: Their businesses are all saved by the money — lots of it, in cash — and yet the "hippies" and "kids" are so strange!

Ang Lee's movie revisits the familiar Summer of Love fiction without much in the way of complication or investigation. Stereotypes serve as characters, from traumatized Vietnam war veteran Billy (Emile Hirsch) and naked theatrical troupe (led by Dan Fogler) to sexy trippers in a colorful VW bus (Paul Dano and Kelli Garner) and hairy-chested transvestite ex-marine Vilma (Liev Schreiber). The focus on Elliot's family proves less insightful or poignant than broadly cartoonish, and his journey is rendered in a too-obvious metaphor: He never makes it to the actual concert, but slogs through mud and flowers and crowds of most excellent kids, only to come to a new self-understanding.