Taking Woodstock

Grade: C

Like the rolling meadows that embody this now legendary concert happening, there are flashes of serenity and beauty to be found in Director Ang Lee’s latest, but that doesn’t prevent both the field and the film from becoming a muddy, garbage-strewn mess in the end.

Less about the actual event than an unfocused coming of age story, a closeted young man finds his independence and sexual freedom while trying to save his parent’s dilapidated motel from certain foreclosure. When a helicopter lands in his front yard and out pops concert promoter Michael Lang (an adorably twinkling and appropriately mellow Jonathan Groff – the only actor in the film who can say “far out” and make it sound genuine) there is little doubt parental objections will transition into financial glee, angry townspeople with break out nasty signage, and hippie quirkiness will abound in prototypical abundance.

It is more surprisingly hallucinogenic than dropping acid (so I’ve been told) to watch the usually adept Ang Lee so misdirect his actors – rarely has a cast of such exceptional talent been so poorly/oddly utilized. Imelda Staunton (who gave the finest performance of 2004 in the magnificent “Vera Drake”) chews everything in her path as a raving, mouth-foaming Jewish mother with a heart of pure stone and a secret in her own closet, and Henry Goodman (much maligned for his egregious firing by chickenshit producers from Broadway’s “The Producers” and one of the finest actors of his or any generation) is mostly reduced to muttering and shrugging as the beleaguered, stoop-shouldered husband who has put up with such an ungodly terror for 40 years. It is Tevye and Golde transported to upstate New York, and the characterizations are at best stereotypically uncomfortable. Emile Hirsch fares no better as the standardly agonized Vietnam Vet (replete with dirty long hair, foul mouth, flack jacket and flashbacks) who comes home to a world that doesn’t understand him, and poor Liev Schreiber is almost unendurable as a transgendered veteran who provides gun-toting security and transcendental wisdom impossible to decipher. In the lead role of the son treated like such neverending crap by his mother it’s impossible to understand his familial devotion, Demetri Martin does no harm. A lot of extraordinary talent must have signed on the dotted line on Ang Lee’s reputation without actually reading James Schamus’ ineptly plodding screenplay first, this much is clear.

Will the young innocent show up at a press conference stoned out of his mind? Will the angry townspeople refuse his patronage at the local diner? Will his parents eat the pot-laced brownies? Will the hippie performance artists who live in the barn decide to disrobe at the least possibly appropriate opportunity? Filled to overflowing with cliché-ridden plot contrivances, Lee has an awkward inability to capture the essence of the time or generation. Neither the personal story nor its backdrop have a great deal of passion or conviction behind them, which leaves the film to meander much like the throngs trying to find their way through blocked roads and drug-induced hazes to the damn concert. There is an earnest quality of love, peace and harmony flowing, but it feels piped in through tinny loudspeakers rather than enveloping us in its music. We’re sitting in the cheap seats. Only several quiet moments between father and son transcend and elevate the material to something with genuine heart. Lee’s overuse of splitscreens so quintessential in the award-winning documentary “Woodstock,” only remind us we are watching an off-key simulation.

Like, so not groovin to the beat, dude. I mean, it tries to be all trippin and far out, but it so just brought me down, man.

More Movie Info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1127896/