Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock: Review

Demetri Martin is a wonderfully clever young comedian - one of his hour-long stand up specials pondered the meaning of "if" in a sort of hip and casual routine, to be summed up perfectly in one of his first lines: "the unexamined life is not worth living... man!". He's sort of your average guy, a laid back philosopher with a charismatic sort of anti-charisma. Unfortunately, however, his charm as a stand up comedian doesn't translate in the slightest to the big screen.

Martin plays Elliot Teichberg in Ang Lee's "Taking Woodstock", the story of the real-life Elliot Tiber, who successfully brought the musical-festival-to-end-all-musical-festivals to his humble hometown. His parents, Sonia (Imelda Staunton) and Jake Teichberg (Henry Goodman), run a dump of a hotel called the El Monaco resort. When Elliot learns that the Woodstock festival is without a home, he succeeds in displacing it to the fields of a local dairy farmer, Max Yasgur (Eugene Levy). The influx of hundreds of thousands of hippies leave Elliot hated by his neighbors, but the boom in business helps keep the Monaco afloat.

Everyone in the film seems to be acting in an entirely different universe, but thank god for the wonderful performers like Imelda Staunton. Her Sonia Teichberg is beyond caricature - she's a paranoid old troll who takes pleasure in shoeing off naked hippies with a broomstick. But such a broad supporting performance is welcome in a film with what is, frankly, an enormously dull leading performance.

The film isn't all a flop - most of the performances are good, the cinematography is gorgeous (watch out for a beautiful sequence in which Elliot rides through the crowded streets on a motorcycle), and the writing, although largely lifeless, is successful in avoiding too many sentimental cliches. There are certain things that are left unexplored, such as Elliot's fear of revealing to his parents that he is a homosexual, that work greatly to the film's benefit. However, every time we get an interesting development, the movie rides straight off course in an embarrassing distraction - the sequence involving Paul Dano, Kelli Garner, and acid, in particular, is an unforgivable misfire.

The Woodstock music festival will be remembered for sex, drugs, and rock n' roll, but "Taking Woodstock" instead settles for a rather inoffensive coming-of-age tale that has all the edge of your typical episode of "That '70s Show". Lee is clearly a masterful director, but this is perhaps his biggest disappointment - for a film about such a larger-than-life spectacle, it feels inconsequential and lifeless.