'Taking Woodstock': One man's pretty groovy experience

Movie review

The great filmmaker Ang Lee has a gift for re-creating time and place, taking us back to worlds now gone: 1940s Shanghai ("Lust, Caution"), 1960s Wyoming ("Brokeback Mountain"), Jane Austen's England ("Sense & Sensibility"), 19th-century China ("Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"). His uncharacteristically slight new film, "Taking Woodstock" feels a step away from these; as if "Brokeback Mountain" were narrated by some other cowboy who only saw Jake and Ennis from a distance.

But "Taking Woodstock" has its pleasures; it's really a sweet-natured coming-of-age tale, with a famously groundbreaking rock concert lurking in the background. (Meaning: If you're looking for something about the music, look elsewhere, such as Michael Wadleigh's Oscar-winning 1970 documentary "Woodstock.")

Elliot Tiber (Demetri Martin) is a sad-eyed young man with big ideas. He's moved back home in the summer of 1969, to help his immigrant parents (Imelda Staunton, Henry Goodman) manage the family business: a rundown, grubby motel in the Catskills, where his mother only changes the sheets if she thinks the previous night's guests have "done something."

As luck would have it, Elliot just happens to possess a valid summer-concert permit when some guests arrive in town, looking for a site for a rock festival. "Far out," says the show's beatific producer (Jonathan Groff, wreathed in an angelic halo of hair), and soon local dairy farmer Max Yasgur (Eugene Levy) agrees to lend his fields for the occasion, in exchange for some money and a promise to "clean up after yourselves." The rest, of course, is history.

Lee, working with longtime collaborator James Schamus (who wrote the screenplay based on Tiber's real-life memoir), nicely create the sense of a small town slowly overcome by the creeping ivy of an upcoming event — and then suddenly strangled by it. We watch the once-quiet road outside the motel become choked with cars, and the motel overrun by cheerful and frequently naked folk with flowers in their hair.

There are moments in "Taking Woodstock" that feel out of place: Staunton's overplayed performance; an awkward father-and-son reconciliation near the end; an experimental-theater company that overstays its welcome; some self-conscious nods to the present day. (A local is horrified by the idea of selling bottled water to the festivalgoers. "A dollar? For WATER?")

But there's also a bit — just a bit — of Lee's usual magic. When Elliot finally makes his way near to the festival, we see a stage far away, nestled in a valley surrounded by hills and covered with humanity. The music, indistinct, seems to shimmer, as Elliot and the crowd disappear into a huge, rolling wave and wall of sound and light. Just for a moment, he has become part of the concert, and just like that, Woodstock has become a part of him.

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com