Relatively late in Taking Woodstock, director Ang Lee’s
outsider’s take on the colossal 1969 music festival, clean-cut
protagonist Elliot Teichberg (Demetri Martin) decides to venture down
from his family’s motel-turned-event-headquarters to the center of the
action. Lee depicts the barely operable road to Woodstock crowded with
hippies, cops, protesters, makeshift food vendors, and other masses of
humanity in an elongated take that rhymes — perhaps consciously
— with the classic traffic-jam tracking shot in Jean-Luc Godard’s
1967 film Weekend.

Godard, documenting late-’60s tumult as it happened, used the image
as a vision of societal collapse. Lee, looking back 40 years at someone
else’s history, takes a more sanguine view — to the point
that Elliot is being escorted on the back of a motorcycle by a cop who
expected to be bashing hippie heads but is instead wearing a flower in
his helmet.

You can argue about the accuracy of these perspectives, but there’s
little arguing about who got the more impressive shot: While Godard
stuck with his unbroken tracking shot for more than seven audacious,
increasingly provocative, brilliantly staged minutes, Lee’s film lacks
the stamina for as fully realized a counterpoint. And that
juxtaposition is instructive, for as likeable as Lee’s film is, its
genial embrace of the mellow infects its narrative construction and
visual sense.

Lee’s film is a fond recreation of Woodstock as a cultural memory
that mostly ignores the bad stuff — the bad trips, the sometimes
bad music. Even the white-hot coals of culture war are doused in fresh
chocolate milk.

The plot follows young upstater Elliot as he uses a permit for an
annual “arts festival” on the grounds of his parents’
soon-to-be-foreclosed motel “resort” to lure the suddenly homeless
Woodstock festival, roping neighboring dairy farmer Max Yasgur (a
pleasingly understated and nicely cast Eugene Levy) and his acres of
grazing land into the deal. Some of the neighbors resist the idea of a
hippie invasion in their quaint little town, but Max is undeterred:
“I’ve heard more pleases and thank-you’s from these kids than I’ve ever
heard from those schmucks,” he tells Elliot.

Lee’s casting is compelling throughout — Imelda Staunton is
Elliot’s intense Minsk-bred mother, Emile Hirsch is a ‘Nam burnout
former classmate, and Liev Schreiber in a blond wig and sheer cotton
dress works better than you could possibly expect.

Lee uses split-screen imagery in homage to the original Woodstock
film, but his characters never quite make it to “the center of the
universe” that the concert stage represents. Taking Woodstock is
less interested in the stars onstage than the regular citizens the
festival threw together, with a perspective that manages to feel both
utopian and grounded.

This nostalgic take might be insufferable from an Oliver Stone or
some other American boomer with an “I was there, man” perspective, but
coming from Lee, its warmth is charming, especially since it seems to
consciously be a vision of the late ’60s as it should have been rather
than a claim for what it was. It’s a minor, imperfect work, but
Taking Woodstock‘s gentle, open-hearted view of cops and queers,
middle-class townsfolk and hippies is counter-mythology that’s hard to
resist.