Taking Woodstock
by Melissa Anderson
"If you remember Woodstock, you probably weren't there," the expression goes. And if you were, can you please stop gassing on about it? To its credit, Taking Woodstock — based on Elliot Tiber's 2007 memoir, Taking Woodstock: A True Story of a Riot, a Concert, and a Life and written for the screen by director Ang Lee's frequent collaborator James Schamus — features no actors pantomiming Janis Joplin, Ravi Shankar or Sha Na Na. On display instead are inane portrayals of Jews, performance artists, trannies, Vietnam vets, squares and freaks. The gayness of Elliot (Demetri Martin) becomes Lee's tenuous overarching theme, though his Uranian tendencies must be hidden from his Jewish-émigré parents, Jake and Sonia (Henry Goodman and Imelda Staunton), who run a decrepit motel in Bethel, New York. The good son leaves Manhattan to help them; after reading that a neighboring town says no to hosting an event for a bunch of longhairs, he sets the wheels in motion for the concert to be held in his Catskills hamlet. Taking Woodstock does nothing more than recycle the same late-'60s tropes seen countless times since the Carter administration.
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