Far out: Demetri Martin (centre) makes some new friends in Taking Woodstock
Directed by Ang Lee. Starring Demetri Martin, Emile Hirsch, Imelda Staunton, Henry Goodman, Jonathan Groff, Mamie Gummer
16 cert, lim release, 110 min
“WE ARE stardust. We are golden,” Joni Mitchell (who wasn’t there) sang when pretending to remember the celebration of musical mediocrity and blind optimism that was Woodstock. Stardust? Golden? Does that sound like something you’d like to experience? No wonder the hippie dream so quickly curdled into a target for ridicule and satire.
The good news is that Ang Lee, adapting a well-regarded memoir by Eliot Tiber, allegedly a local organiser of the event, has left The Grateful Dead to their century-long solos and Sha Na Na to their tired rock'n'roll humour. There is scarcely a bar of music in Taking Woodstock. The bad news is that Lee asks us to set aside irony for a sincere embrace of temporary hippie utopia.
To be sure, Lee’s sincerity does ultimately prove hard to resist. Demetri Martin, a talented stand-up comedian, plays Tiber as a combination of counterculture pioneer and sunny naïf. Living with his monstrously domineering mother (Imelda Staunton) and his tolerant, fatalistic dad (Henry Goodman) in upstate New York, he somehow becomes a player in the local chamber of commerce.
When Tiber hears that a music festival has been barred from the town of Woodstock itself, he invites the organisers to make use of a licence he has organised for a much more humble event.
Much of the film takes place in and around the Tiber family's motel. Though Lee makes reference to Michael Wadleigh's famous Woodstockdocumentary – brief, blurred film sequences appear in split-screen – we are never in any doubt that this is a drama concerning those on the happy periphery of the main action.
Taking Woodstockdoes have its dark moments. Staunton's absurdly broad but undeniably hilarious turn as the neurotic Mrs Tiber hints at tragedies encountered fleeing Russia as a persecuted Jew.
However, Taking Woodstockremains a kind of thumbs-up, blissed-out complement to the director's evisceration of the 1970s in The Ice Storm. It's not nearly as good as that classic, but it is, like, a really cool film to chill out to, man.
Stardust and golden, you might say.
