Taking Woodstock

Taking Woodstock (Demetri Martin, Imelda Staunton, Harry Goodman, Eugene Levy, Emile Hirsch, Liev Schreiber) – In the summer of 1969, my friend Mitch and I decided to go to one of top pop festivals in the east.  Our choices:  The Atlantic City Pop Festival a week after the moon landing to be held at the Atlantic City Race Track on the Jersey shore at the beginning of the month or a dairy farm in upstate New York owned by Max Yasgur in White Lake a couple of weeks later.  Of course, we chose to go to the shore, thus missing history but hearing some of the top rock groups of the era.  Taking Woodstock tells the “back story” of the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, mostly based on history if not the event itself.  The movie tells the story of the Teichbergs, owners of a small, run-down motel in White Lake.  Jewish immigrants who left Brooklyn to move upstate, Jake and Sonia had big dreams for their place that were never fulfilled.  Jake went into the roofing business to stay afloat.  As the movie opens, their son, Elliott, an artist who left Manhattan to save his folks’ place from foreclosure, is heading the local Chamber of Commerce.  The Chamber okays his permit for his annual music festival, a small affair that seldom drew a large crowd but helped keep the motel afloat.  When a nearby town, Wallkill, pulled out of a rock festival sponsored by Woodstock Ventures, Elliot hatches the plan to use his permit to lure Woodstock to White Lake.  The family’s land is practically a marsh so Elliot enlists friend Max Yasgur to let the group use his land.  The rest is history.

 

Taking Woodstock deals with the doings before the festival, then introduces us to lots of hippies, druggies, a transvestite (played by Liev Schreiber), and a nude theater troupe before taking us to the outskirts of the festival itself.  The crowd shut down the expressway from New York City, and most of the estimated 500,000 people never got anywhere near the stage.  But this film by Director Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain, Sense and Sensibility, The Ice Storm) never takes us to the music.  We follow Elliot as he heads to hear the music but ends up getting stoned and sliding down a muddy hill caused by the torrential downpours that delayed some of the festival. Woodstock became the emblem for the age of free love, drugs, sex and rock ‘n roll, which reached its height in 1969 and 1970.  Over the next year came the Altamont festival in the Bay Area featuring the Rolling Stones, Hell’s Angels, the shooting at Kent State, and the closure of several college campuses.  Public sentiment turned against the Vietnam War for good.  But that is not addressed in the movie.  It’s a film well worth seeing.  Just don’t expect to hear or see the music.

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