Summer of Love or Love of Receipts? Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock

David Begelman  

You don’t hear Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Who, or The Grateful Dead doing their thing in Ang Lee’s film about the summer of 1969. That’s when half a million love children from all over the country descended on an upper New York State community, to revel in a mind-blowing concert with performances by these notables—among many others.

If the film is supposedly about the event, without any of the performing artists who made the occasion so memorable, you might be tempted to ask, “What’s Woodstock without them?” At the risk of cliché-ridden sentiment, you might say Woodstock could be imaginatively any number of things: an outpouring of flower-power, the stupendous celebration of an age, an anti-war spectacle, the most humongous concert ever, a showpiece for rock idols, a drug-besotted bacchanalia, or other iconic possibilities.

Ang Lee’s chief focus is actually none of these, although his cinematic canvas is laced plentifully with traces of them. He throws a hell of a lot of stuff into Taking Woodstock, including images of flower children coming and going frenetically, and accumulating in crowds as far as the eye can see. (The actual festival, contrary to expectation, was a remarkably peaceful affair, given the multitude of young people who attended it.) In the film, hippies slosh delightfully around in the mud, congregate in shanties improvised for the occasion, revel in states of exaltation provided by acid trips, and gather on the capacious grounds of the Woodstock lawn. It is a head-trip like no other.

But all this is salad dressing atop the real theme of the movie: how an enterprising and impecunious lad, Elliot Teichberg (played by the stand-up comedian, Demetri Martin), brings the whole thing off with meager financial resources. Mr. Lee’s film, despite its detours, is best described as a study of venture capitalism.

As if to accentuate the theme, the increasingly solvent Elliot connects with Michael (Jonathan Groff), a promoter of Elliott’s efforts to organize the concert. Michael, smiling knowingly every time he is on screen, is a living oxymoron: an affluent hippie.

Michael sees all the commercial possibilities in the Woodstock project, even before Elliot has a realistic grasp of them. The point is not lost; a flower child can also have a nose for business when the opportunity presents itself. At the end of the film, Michael is seen riding away on a horse like a Plantagenet king, brimming with satisfaction. The charger bolts off amid the detritus strewn across the lawn in the aftermath of the event. It’s not peace and love that brightens the day for Elliot and Michael; it’s cash receipts.

Taking Woodstock is also a film split right down the middle. It wavers between highlighting the foibles of central characters who are shot pretty much in close-ups, and a semi-documentary treatment of teeming throngs of youngsters seen at varying distances from the camera.

Aside from Michael, featured players in Elliot Teichberg’s ever changing world include his henpecked father, Jake (Henry Goodman) and his mother, Sonia (Imelda Staunton), who carries on as if she was forever confusing Woodstock with Armaggedon. She browbeats everyone in sight, not to mention hippies doing their love thing under cover of foliage: “No shtupping in the bushes!” she hollers at the twosome, who, caught in flagrante delecto, take to the hills stark naked. When someone asks Jake what makes him stay with Sonia, you can hear his response almost dripping with the strains of a thousand Stradavari: “Because I love her!”  

Elliot’s financial adventure, launched on the modest basis of his being the president of a local Chamber of Commerce, was originally intended to relieve the pressure on his parents and their foundering motel, “El Monaco.” The place has seen its better days, possibly because Jake and Imelda know next to nothing about presentation. At one point in the film, Jake is seen pouring a gallon of commercial bleach into the motel swimming pool, while the place in general seems to be a more appropriate getaway for a family of Kallikaks than for any customer with a credit card, maxed to the hilt or not.

A transsexual Korean war veteran by the name of Vilma is played by the always reliable Lief Schreiber. As security guard for the event, he replaces two Mafiosa who show up offering protection for a sizable slice of the Woodstock action. In the only act of aggression in Taking Woodstock, they are sent scurrying away by Jake who reverses the odds by beating them off mercilessly with a bat, Al Capone style. Unlike real mobsters, they do not stage a comeback with backup.    

The surging crowds of youngsters attending the Woodstock event are Mr. Lee’s special focus. Like the street scenes in his masterpiece, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, as well as in Lust, Caution, they are handsomely directed. At one point, however, he contrives to stuff as many images of flower children on a frame as he can, resorting suddenly to a split-screen technique. The device, pioneered in the 1903 film, Life of an American Fireman, worked in that era. In Taking Woodstock, it sticks out like a sore-thumb maneuver smacking of redundancy.

The film leaves one strangely unsatisfied. Maybe this is because we want Taking Woodstock to be about Woodstock, even if we’re not quite sure what Woodstock it is that we have in mind.