Maybe Taking Woodstock was pretty decent. Maybe it held its own as a film. But it’s hard to see that when you go in with high expectations. I’m thinking maybe if I had gone in with no expectations, or low expectations as I had with All About Steve, I would have liked this film more. But, no. I went in wanting too much, I guess. I wanted comedy, history, and music. I got a good amount of history, a dash of comedy, and no music. No music, in a film about Woodstock? Really? Ouch.
It was definitely an intimate, informative, and interesting look into how this world-changing event came to be. I did truly appreciate and enjoy the story of the Teichberg family, who owned the motel that’s a failure and disrepair-inspired son Eliot (Demitri Martin) to get the festival to be held there in Bethel. Old country staunch Russian Jewish Mrs. Teichburg was played impeccably by Imelda Staunton, and resigned-to-resign Mr. Teichburg was played sadly and compassionate-inducing by Henry Goodman. This brings me to the fact that the cast saved the film. And it was a true ensemble cast.
Established actors had mere tens of lines, but that’s okay. They each brought a little something to the wide landscape that set this historic event in motion. Emile Hirsh as a kid just returned from Vietnam and suffering from some pretty severe PTSD, Jeffrey Dean Morgan representing the town’s angry, anti-hippie population, Eugene Levy as the kindly entrepreneur, Max, who actually supplied the very land the festival was held on, Jonathan Groff as the ever-calming Michael Lang (the festival’s promoter and creative force), and perhaps most of all, Liev Schreiber as Vilma, the cross-dressing Korean War vet who has arrived to serve as brute force protection and yet with some gentle words of wisdom, too.
And Martin, it must be said, played Eliot with a good heart, quirkiness, nervousness, and awkwardness that made you root for him the whole time. In general, a lot of characters were rather a cliche, especially when you come to the freshly back Vietnam vets losing their minds and the hippies who live in the VW van with a life supply of acid. But for the first time, they belonged. So, you excuse the cliches, because they finally make sense, they’re justified. This is the origin of these characters, at a time when they were real.
So what makes the film barely make it past “meh?” I suppose that would be director Ang Lee, as much as I hate to say it. The film was slow, conversations and scenes lasting much longer than possible. There was an acid trip scene that lasted way, way too long, like okay, the acid makes you hallucinate, we get it (I actually felt nauseated during it), and dear Lord, if I saw that damned unnecessary theatre troupe naked one more time…
The biggest disappointment was that there was NO representation AT ALL of the one thing that made Woodstock was it was: the music. I’m guessing there were issues with rights? I mean, there wasn’t even a steady flow of music by Woodstock artists playing softly in the background somewhere. Okay, you got everything else right with the logistic history, but how can you make a movie about Woodstock with no music? It seems like such an easy question to us, but unfortunately, I guess Lee didn’t see it that way.