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Wasted Opportunity

This year marks the 40th anniversary of Woodstock — long revered by baby boomers as the defining image of the 1960s youth culture. In August 1969, people came by the truckload to see the likes of The Who, Jimi Hendrix and the Grateful Dead play "3 Days of Peace & Music" on a remote upstate dairy farm. Though it is always referred to as such, this momentous occasion didn't actually take place in Woodstock, but some 40-odd miles away in the town of Bethel, NY. How the festival came to this unlikely location is the subject of "Taking Woodstock", directed by Ang Lee and based on the memoirs of Elliot Tiber.

Nestled in the Catskills, with rolling farmland and rustic resorts, Bethel is the last place anyone would associate with sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Tiber (Demetri Martin), a doe-eyed, soft-spoken interior designer, spends his summers in the country helping run his parents' ramshackle roadside motel, the El Monaco. His parents, Jake and Sonia Teichberg (Henry Goodman and Imelda Staunton) can barely keep the motel from falling around their ears, relying heavily on their son for cheap labor and financial help.

Exasperated by his parents' old-world attitudes and their dependence upon him, it falls to Elliot to invent new ways to bring visitors to the motel. One of Elliot's many ideas — an El Monaco music festival (consisting mainly of listening to a stack of records in the courtyard) — had proven somewhat popular with the locals the previous summer. As the head of the Bethel Chamber of Commerce, it's a no-brainer for Elliot to get a 3-day permit for another festival.

Not that the El Monaco is entirely family-friendly. Hidden away in an old barn next to the motel, Elliot allows a commune/theater group, The Earthlight Players, to live rent-free. With no audience, no money and an apparent aversion to clothes, the actors' hippie lifestyle would be anathema to the townspeople of Bethel. Though kept out of sight, for Elliot, they represent a freedom that he can't or won't embrace. Tied to his parents and living as a closeted gay man, he's the very picture of repression, yearning to break free.

Upon learning that another music festival has been kicked out of nearby Wallkill, Elliot impulsively calls the organizers — Woodstock Ventures — and offers the El Monaco as an alternate location. Desperate for a new venue, festival organizer Michael Lang (Jonathan Groff) and his army of number-crunchers, financial backers and hangers-on descend upon Bethel. The swamp around El Monaco is deemed unfit for concert grounds but Lang buys out the motel for their HQ and recruits Elliot as a community liaison. With Elliot's help, they find the ideal concert grounds — 600 acres of cow pasture owned by dairyman Max Yasgur (Eugene Levy).

The festival may have been ostensibly about peace and love, but it was also about making money. Both Lang and Yasgur smell opportunity, and their negotiations prove them both to be sharp businessmen, despite Yasgur's easygoing affability and Lang's long hair, beatific smile and hippie clothes. But what they, Elliot, and the townspeople failed to anticipate was how many people would actually show up to the festival. What begins as a trickle becomes a flood, engulfing the entire community.

Ang Lee, as evidenced by his films "Brokeback Mountain", "The Ice Storm" and even "Hulk", is a master of repression. In "Taking Woodstock", repression runs deep through the entire community. Billy (Emile Hirsch), a vet with PTSD finds it hard to adjust to civilian life with his straight-laced older brother, Dan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). Elliot's father barely speaks to him or to anyone else, while his mother — stifled by grief and rage over the hardships she experienced as a young girl in Russia — keeps both her long-suffering husband and her dutiful son on a short leash.

The only character who is not repressed is Vilma (Liev Schreiber), a cross-dressing ex-Marine who arrives with the first wave of concertgoers. Her complete acceptance of herself and who she is serves as a catalyst for change in Elliot and in his family. Well, that was the intention, at any rate. As the drugs, the free love and the freaks flood into Bethel, one assumes they would bring with it Elliot's awakening. But Lee's direction is so contained, and writer James Schamus' script so spare, we never feel the promised cathartic release. The brilliant performances of Staunton and Goodman provide the only true bright spots of film. The rest is stale, stereotypical and not a little boring. There is nothing new to see in this tie-dyed, long-haired image of Woodstock. Lee even takes pains to recreate parts of Michael Wadleigh's 1970 "Woodstock" documentary, particularly the use of split-screen montages (also used, oddly enough, in "Hulk").

It's ironic that the study of Bethel before the festival should be so much more engaging than what followed. Perhaps it's because of the knowledge that soon the brief blip of peace, love and togetherness of Woodstock will be quickly consumed by the chaos and tragedy of Altamont. That the drugs lead to rehab. And the days of free love would be replaced by the AIDS epidemic. To the baby boomers out there who claim to remember Woodstock, this is the image you created. You can take it back. There's nothing more we can learn from it.