Taking Woodstock: A Focused Depiction of a Major Event

REVIEW: 3.5/5             

Director Ang Lee's newest film, 'Taking Woodstock', is a beautifully crafted, tenderly rendered film about Elliot Teichberg (Demetri Martin, in a surprisingly heartfelt performance), a well-to-do, proactive type, who is trying desperately to help save his mother and father's financially afflicted Motel estate.  It seems that all is lost (there are a group of theater actors that live in the estate's barn free of charge...  seriously), when the event that would come to be known as 'Woodstock' was cancelled and subsequently moved to Elliot's small town in the Catskill Mountains of New York, thanks to Elliot's own audacity.

His parents, who tread a fine line between stereotypical Jewish parents and actual human people, are given proper, if seemingly awkward, development throughout the film.  Nonetheless, actors Imelda Staunton and Henry Goodman bring to their characters the sublimely benevolent traits that one would expect from such caricatures.  The fact that they are written as exaggerated prototypes cannot be discharged, but the actors' ability to subdue the hyperbole and replace it with genuine affliction elevates their feasibility.  

Lee and his cast are focused on telling Elliot's story, and no one else's, which may be the reason for the film's wavering tone.  This is Elliot's journey (literally and figuratively), briefly punctuated by visits from the then contemporary neo-nazis, a security guard in drag, naked 'troupe' actors, hippie-hating townspeople, and an unusual bit of character development (you'll see).  While these may appear as abnormal elements for a film that was marketed as focusing on 'Woodstock' the show, they are, in fact, highly necessary in an attentive depiction of the kid that organized the location for Woodstock.

Spectators expecting to get front row seats to a recreation of the concert should avoid this film.  The Woodstock show is merely the film's backdrop, which just happened to provide a kind of supernatural help to a kid who desperately needed it.