In the wan and spindly "Taking Woodstock," the spirit of the times wafts liberally but lightly, taking an extra-mellow approach to a nostalgic milestone that's better known for its boisterous vivacity and heaving humanity. It's a purposeful choice by director Ang Lee and writer James Schamus, as they use the legendary music festival as the backdrop of a more personal story about a young man who discovers his own individuality amid the wild-and-woolly happening that epitomized the late 1960s.
Nothing in this mild snapshot of time and place juts out in high relief; it rambles along with a generous heart and gentle sense of humor, though with gauzy and forgettable results. Not only is there no concert footage, real or re-created, but the movie misses a steady, hooky beat of its own.
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"Taking Woodstock" isn't about music; it's about the unlikely putting together of the epic three-day festival and the lives the party affects in the upstate New York farm community of Bethel. At the film's center is comedian Demetri Martin, who plays Elliot Teichberg, a fictionalized Elliot Tiber on whose memoirs the story is based. Trying to pump cash into the town's troubled economy, Elliot invites the Woodstock event to Bethel, where it's met by locals with both consternation and excitement, but mostly consternation.
Max Yasgur (an unusually laid-back Eugene Levy) offers concert organizers — including festival co-creator Michael Lang (Jonathan Groff, all angelic curls and beatific grins) — use of his 600-acre dairy farm, while other denizens protest, with xenophobic vigor, the invitation of thousands of hippies into their quiet town.
We're supposed to be riveted by Elliot's story, about how he learns the lessons of Woodstock — breaking free from his overbearing parents (cartoonishly played by Imelda Staunton and Henry Goodman), coming out of the gay closet and loosening up, including taking his first hit of acid and swan-diving into the festival's famous storm-stirred mud baths. He represents a kind of innocence lost and worldliness found. Woodstock sets him free.
But it's an obvious tale, one told before with more conviction and fire. The film too often bogs down in the quasi-interesting logistics of throwing a huge music festival, and it attempts to spice things up with strenuously "colorful" characters, such as Liev Schreiber's transvestite ex-Marine, that fall flat. Its evocation of the all-too-familiar '60s vibe has a check-list feel, fringed with hundreds of writhing, peace-sign-flashing extras in wigs and denim.
Martin, who has his own show on Comedy Central, is a comic who trades on a deadpan every-guy persona that's wry, dry and a little surreal. Though he's fairly dull and recessive as a leading man, he brings the quiet, aching sensitivity of the repressed individual to the role, making his casting both imperfect and inspired.
With judicious bits of Woodstockian music lacing the soundtrack, "Taking Woodstock" is meant to be a joyous pleasure, and though it's certainly not a downer and exudes a feathery excitement, it never infects you. It hints at the transcendence of the event and its music, but doesn't capture it.
