Taking Woodstock

Every now and then, I find myself thinking that I was born at the wrong time, and I usually find myself thinking this when I read about the 1960s or see a movie that gets into the hippie excesses of the 1960s - especially the latter half of the decade, after we put troops on the ground in Vietnam and had the Summer of Love. Taking Woodstock, obviously, is such a picture. It’s also an Ang Lee picture, so I had a bit of trepidation going in, as I’ve begun to notice that most of the Ang Lee pictures I have seen start out so slowly as to be ponderous - even the otherwise brilliant Brokeback Mountain - and only manage to ramp up to a sort of geriatric crawl, even during the most important scenes.

Adapted from the memoirs of Elliot Tiber - apparently Ang Lee is also averse to working with original screenplays - this is the story of how the Woodstock concert came to be, more so than it is about the actual concert and the music that was played and the musicians who were there (and who were not there). It’s forty years now since the concert, and there is certainly no shortage of commemorative music to be found to celebrate the anniversary; this is the other side of the story - everything that was going on at Woodstock besides the concert: hundreds of thousands of kids getting high, getting laid, getting muddy, and camping out on a section of rural New York highway that the state police had to close due to the congestion created by people arriving for the festival. It’s the story of how a group of people co-opted the fields of a local dairy farmer called Max Yasgur and basically cut off a small section of rural New York from the rest of the world so that they could hold a festival that they had no idea would turn into the monstrous event that actually took place during those three days of peace and music.

Tiber’s parents were running a roadside motel in the summer of 1969 when Elliot read in the newspaper about the banning of a music festival to be put on by Woodstock Ventures in the nearby town of Wallkill, New York; Elliot was at an awkward time in his life, having just moved back in with his parents - after living in Manhattan for a number of years - in order to help them get the mortgage on the motel out of arrears; and the time, of course, was ripe for the bright young Elliot to do something big with his life. The time also seems ripe to begin railing against the melodramatic use of the standard coming-of-age story by an overly sentimental director. Happily, though, we don’t have to do that. We can still rail against Ang Lee for starting his movies slowly (although this may have more to do with his being Taiwanese than with his being an overrated director - apparently it’s standard operating procedure for films from Taiwan to open slowly), but he manages mostly to avoid the melodrama. In fact, he makes a pointed decision to move away from the very intense drama he’s worked with in recent films (Lust, Caution and Brokeback Mountain) and toward an actual comedy. I’m not sure, however, that he quite gets there. There are funny moments, but there are at least as many awkward moments that feel like they were supposed to be funny as there are genuinely funny moments - almost as though Lee isn’t really sure how to direct comedy and like his actors aren’t really sure what to do when he tries.

The choice to the show the things going on behind the scenes, rather than the concert itself, is an interesting one - and one that works, I think - because Woodstock, at least in the popular culture, has always been at least as much about the spectacle of the gathering as it has been about the music - some of which was postponed or cancelled due to rain, and some acts didn’t end up going on stage until the very wee hours of the morning, when most of the festival-goers were asleep (or passed out). Before I saw the trailer for this film, I don’t know that it had ever really occurred to me that Woodstock, at some point anyway, had to have gone through a stage when it was just in the planning, when there were still logistics of permits and financing and security and accommodations to figure out; and I had not known that the venue had changed so close to the date of the festival, to the point that actually putting together an event in Bethel, New York, wasn’t so much about getting everything right as it was getting the absolute essentials - namely, a stage - ready to go so that the tens of thousands of expected attendees (there were around 100,000 tickets already sold at the time of the venue change) would have something to see when they got there.

The climax of the film comes when Elliot finally goes to Max’s fields to see the concert, which has been his goal all along - but which is hard to do when you’re in charge of so many things back at the base camp. There is some discrepancy in the historical record regarding who called whom at the outset of changing the venue from Wallkill to Bethel and regarding how well Elliot knew Max Yasgur (if at all, though they seem quite chummy in the film); but the film is not a documentary (that film has already been made), and it’s not a concert film (I don’t know if that one got made or not) - it’s a fictionalized account of Elliot’s involvement with the biggest concert of all time, and the point is doing the thing itself. In this case, it means putting on the festival - which is a microcosmic rebellion that also works as an allegory to the macrocosmic rebellion that took place generally in the 1960s.

Elliot never makes it to the concert. Instead, he spends the night in a van with two hippies from California (I may be wrong on the state they came from, but it doesn’t matter), played by Paul Dano and Kelli Garner. Elliot drops acid for the first time and experiences a mind-bending change in his perceptions that is also - like so much else in this film - indicative of the larger themes of the 1960s; but there’s something else going on here, something that goes back to Elliot’s unwillingness to let his parents go when they get behind on their mortgage - even though it is suggested to him by his sister that he do so. It’s never explicitly stated - and since it’s the sixties, it’s sometimes hard to tell where the lines are drawn anyway - but Elliot is gay, and it’s clear by his mannerisms and his demeanor that he feels trapped by his life, both literally and figuratively. His first acid trip allows him to get to a place where he can be okay leaving mom and dad behind and setting out on his own.

Dropping a tab of Pluto is no longer the socially accepted method for getting right with one’s personal demons, of course. A generation ago, though, drugs were very much a way of dealing with pressure - a pressure that was generated largely by the Great American Patriot in the aftermath of the second World War and the attendant post-war prosperity in America. The lovely decade of the 1950s, the first with television, so that all Americans could, for the first time, see exactly the image of American life that a handful of power brokers wanted them to see and thought was the proper kind, cemented into the popular consciousness the fake idea of “traditional marriage” and the patently misogynistic idea of the male breadwinner household. Though both ideas are obviously incorrect and outmoded, they have lived on thanks to conservative people who are afraid of change. These are the ones in the diner at the beginning of the film, after it breaks in the local paper that the festival that was killed by Wallkill is now coming to Bethel - the ones who say they are going to boycott Yasgur’s milk and that all the Jews ought to leave town. This is narrow-minded conservative thinking, but all conservative thinking really is, at the bottom, is fear - fear of change and of the unknown. When people are finally smart enough to face their fears and stop thinking conservatively, then we can finally really talk about the land of the free and the home of the brave.

That’s a lot of pressure to let off, and it should not really have come as a surprise that something like “The Sixties” had to happen in order for that pressure to equalize. So much misguided thinking had to come to a head at some point. The children of the fifties became the young adults of the sixties, and they realized that most of what their parents had taught them was either wrong or dangerous or both. Those young adults didn’t always know what they were doing, and they didn’t get everything right; but the heart of their argument - which culminated with Woodstock - was absolutely correct. They knew that something was wrong, and they knew that they had to get out. Those themes are all still relevant forty years later, and the need to break away from conservative thinking is greater than ever. Taking Woodstock does a really good job of showing us how much was really going on in that tiny little New York town, of showing us how important it is to be truly free - and of reminding us how far we still have to go to get there.