Cannes. "Taking Woodstock"

By David Hudson on 05/15/2009

[Updated through 5/18]

"Considering the iconic event at its center, the most surprising aspect of 'Taking Woodstock' [site] lies with the decision to make it into a rather flat comedy," writes Eric Kohn at indieWIRE. "Even with the ever-versatile Ang Lee behind the camera, this messy historical fiction plays like a two hour 'Saturday Night Live' sketch, and not a very good one, either."

"None of the characters in Ang Lee's 'Taking Woodstock,' adapted from the memoir by key organizer Elliot Tiber, is especially famous," notes Mike D'Angelo at the AV Club, "but the story of the concert itself passed into legend long ago, which means that you're just sitting there waiting for Max Yasgur to show up (hey, it's Eugene Levy!), for the roads into Bethel to be jammed by barefoot hippies, for heavy rains to turn Yasgur's field into a giant mud pit, and, inevitably, for Lee to employ the same split-screen effect that Scorsese and Schoonmaker used when editing Michael Wadleigh's 'Woodstock.' Check, check, check, check, and check please.... Harmless enough, but I expect a lot more from Lee and [James] Schamus, even after 'Hulk.'"

"This backstory saga about the legendary Woodstock Music Festival of '69 works in spots and spurts, but it too often feels ragged and unsure of itself, and doesn't coalesce in a way that feels truly solid or self-knowing," writes Jeffrey Wells.

For Charles Ealy, writing in the Austin Movie Blog, it's mostly "a joy, although it might leave you wishing that those days had never ended. (Yes, I was a hippie, and I played the 'Woodstock' album over and over in my teens.) It made me downright melancholic, but in a good way."

"I'm not a child of the 60s," declares Alex Billington, but at FirstShowing, he gives "Taking Woodstock" a 7.5 out of 10.

The Hollywood Reporter interviews Lee.

Updates, 5/16: "Gentle, genial and about as memorable as a mild reefer high, 'Taking Woodstock' takes a back-door approach to revisit the landmark musical weekend through the antics and efforts of some of the people who made it happen," writes Variety's Todd McCarthy. "A sort of let's-put-on-a-show summer-camp lark for director Ang Lee after the dramatic rigors of 'Brokeback Mountain' and 'Lust, Caution,' the picture serves up intermittent pleasures but is too raggedy and laid-back for its own good, its images evaporating nearly as soon as they hit the screen."

"What's up with the money hoarding? Where did the mafia end up?" Those are just a couple of questions Alison Willmore raises before conceding that "real life rarely includes conveniently tied-up narrative ends. But when part of such a middling, conventional overall package, those hanging plot threads just look more like mistakes."

"While the wider themes are persuasive enough its the smaller human stories that are disappointingly banal as Woodstock becomes a form of therapy for Elliot and his parents," writes Allan Hunter in Screen. "Enjoyable in places and merely humdrum in others, 'Taking Woodstock' ultimately feels like a minor Ang Lee digression in between more memorable works."

"It's a low-wattage film about a high-wattage event," finds the Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt. "Which is somewhat disappointing, though you do get a thoughtful, playful, often amusing film about what happened backstage at one of the 60s' great happenings."

"Once the concert starts and Elliot has his inevitable LSD trip and introduction to free love, the film drops the comedy for a needless coming-of-age denouement in which Elliot breaks from his parents," writes Kaleem Aftab in the Independent. "It would have been better had the movie ended when the concert began."

"This movie won't be for everyone, but it worked for me," writes Anne Thompson. "As a teenager, I drove by Woodstock on Route 17, saw the traffic jams and helicopters, and to my neverending regret, failed to convince my aunt to take us there. Lee... captures the crazy era without losing control of a movie that shifts its tone from scene to scene."

Cannes has video from the press conference.

"[J]ust as Ang Lee caught the contradictions and confusion of the suburban 70s in 'The Ice Storm,' he's not afraid to explore the failings and triumphs of the 60s generation in 'Taking Woodstock'," writes James Rocchi for the Redblog. "Elliot's interested less in peace, love and understanding than he is in business, cash and over-charging.... 'Taking Woodstock' is just interesting enough to make you think again about what the 60s got wrong, what the 60s got right, and what we can learn from them even now whether as a shining example or as a cautionary tale."

IndieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez reports on the press conference.

"Comedian Demetri Martin, making his acting debut as upstate gatekeeper Elliot Tiber, does a yeoman's job carrying all the nonsense on his lanky frame as the young innocent whose plan for a classical-music concert balloons beyond his control into three days of mud-soaked peace, love and music," writes Stephen Garrett for Time Out New York. "His emotional conflict with an overbearing Jewish mother (scenery-chewing Imelda Staunton, practically spitting matzoh in people's faces) is tiresome and makes Elliot's inevitable break from parental control all the more obvious. Most perplexing is his timid emergence out of the closet.... The Oscar-winning director of 'Brokeback Mountain' dialing down gay content? Truth is, indeed, stranger than fiction."

"The good actors playing walking period cliches include Emile Hirsch as a psycho Vietnam vet (honest) and Liev Schreiber as a comic drag queen," notes Tom Carson for GQ. "But the only performer who makes an impact is newbie Jonathan Groff as real-life Woodstock promoter Michael Lang. Groff's innate charisma probably bowdlerizes the original's mercenary streak, but it doesn't matter; every scene he's in is, how you say, money. If only he'd been the central character, Lang's contradictions might have told us something genuinely new about The Decade To End All Decades. More tritely than he knows, Lee treats it as The Decade That Began All Decades instead."

"The business end of the Woodstock enterprise holds some interest, but the family dynamic is sitcom-broad, and contains a near-libelous caricature of immigrant Jews." For Mary and Richard Corliss (Time), this film is "Lee's first total miscalculation, his first wholly inessential film. He'll do better; he almost has to."

Updates, 5/17: Sean O'Hagan looks back to 1969 in the Guardian.

"I laughed more than I ever have during a Lee film," writes the Boston Globe's Wesley Morris. "It's 'Muppets Take Yasgur's Farm.' Elliot is mutedly gay. Hippies are mutedly stoned. And the music is mostly on mute. But Lee is so attuned to the rhythms of human interaction and Schamus, adapting Elliot's book, so good at writing scenarios for characters to interact that building the entire film around Elliot and his parents, two Holocaust survivors (Imelda Staunton and Henry Goodman) running a struggling motel, isn't as lame as it sounds."

"Critics here have not taken kindly to the movie, calling it a the story 'thin,'" notes Howard Feinstein at Filmmaker. "Wrong. It is an accurate adaptation of the memoirs of Elliot Tiber (formerly Teichberg), played here by comic Demetri Martin. Some have even criticized the acting of Imelda Staunton ('Vera Drake'), who portrays Tiber's Jewish mother from hell, Sonia. saying the characterization is overdone and stereotyped. Wrong. Staunton gets it right. In fact, the entire cast is pitch-perfect."

Updates, 5/18: "It's an undemanding film with moderate laughs, but Lee is aiming very low," writes Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian.

"It's a movie that wears the trappings of the countercultural movement like bunting, yet is essentially mild-mannered and rather conventional," writes Wendy Ide in the London Times. "That's not to say that 'Taking Woodstock' is not an enjoyable movie, just that, unlike the event in 1969, it is not likely to secure a lasting place in the collective consciousness."

James Rocchi talks with Lee, Martin and Hirsch for AMC.

"All these years admiring Liev Schreiber and it never occurred to me to wonder what he would look like in heels and hose," writes Tim Hayes in the Critic's Notebook. "Wonder no longer. Mr Schreiber's cross-dressing marine-cum-security guard is the liveliest thing on show in Ang Lee's 'Taking Woodstock,' an easygoing meander around 1969's legendary three-day music festival that ends up being neither one thing nor another. So Mr Schreiber fits right in."

"First and foremost a comedy, 'Taking Woodstock' nevertheless has a faintly serious subtext; it's a movie about transformation, on the level both of the individual and, of course, of society at large." Geoff Andrew in Time Out London: "Vietnam, feminism and gay liberation, the moon landings and other signs of the times all make an appearance, though they never feel clumsily imposed on the proceedings. Unsurprisingly, in many respects the film feels closer to 'The Ice Storm' than to anything else in Lee's oeuvre; and if it doesn't have the emotional punch of that movie, let alone 'Brokeback Mountain,' it does at least come across as a portrait of an era that's affectionate, authentic and pleasingly adult in its tone and concerns."

Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 2009.

[Photo: "Taking Woodstock," Focus Features, 2009]

Tags: Ang Lee, Cannes 2009, James Schamus, Taking Woodstock, Woodstock