Taking Woodstock

Year: 2009

Genres: Comedy

Directed by: Ang Lee

Written by: Elliot Tiber (book)

Starring: Demetri Martin, Emile Hirsch, Imelda Staunton, Henry Goodman, Jonathan Groff, Mamie Gummer, Eugene Levy, Liev Schreiber

Company: Focus Features | Runtime: 110 minutes | Taking Woodstock on IMDB

Working as an interior designer in Greenwich Village, Elliot feels empowered by the gay rights movement. But he is also still staked to the family business - a dumpy Catskills motel called the El Monaco that is being run into the ground by his overbearing parents, Jake and Sonia Teichberg. In the summer of 1969, Elliot has to move back upstate to the El Monaco in order to help save the motel from being taken over by the bank. Upon hearing that a planned music and arts festival has lost its permit from the neighboring town of Wallkill, NY, Elliot calls producer Michael Lang at Woodstock Ventures to offer his family's motel to the promoters and generate some much-needed business. Soon the Woodstock staff is moving into the El Monaco - and half a million people are on their way to Yasgur's farm for "3 days of Peace & Music in White Lake." (Focus Features)

Taking Woodstock trailer

Ti-Tsai

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About 100 minutes into the film, at the end of the festival, we see the hill littered with garbage and alone stand the US national flag in the mud. A requiem for a dream or a token of pride? Ang Lee's seemingly light-hearted and facile approach to the big music event resonates with the contemporary ethos and pathos: the peripheral may speak louder than the mainstream; personal "history" may be eventually written into the GRAND NARRATIVE of history and thus create a dialogue or even hetroglossia. One of Ang Lee's best works!

Todd McCarthy

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The picture serves up intermittent pleasures but is too raggedy and laid-back for its own good, its images evaporating nearly as soon as they hit the screen.

Joanne Kaufman

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The gentle, ambling Ang Lee comedy that's a few tokes short of groovy.

Joe Neumaier

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Something of a traffic jam--even with his usual restraint, Lee couldn't recount a key moment of the '60s without a blurry parade of personalities--and also lullingly dull.

Carrie Rickey

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Lee distills the flavor of this transforming event and hints at how it transformed some who were there. His movie is a contact high.

Philip Wilding

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One mans near-emotionless trip through an event that was the high watermark for US counterculture moves along without any real sense of purpose or pace.

Anthony Lane

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You cant deny the smiling mood that wafts through the film like incense, and to that extent it honors the original three days; but not once does a characters show of feeling stir you, send you, or stop you in your tracks, and the loss is unsustainable.

Mike Scott

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Lee keeps things afloat with an appealing air of levity, including a fun but restrained use of split-screen, an homage to the 1970 doc, as well as cameos by that movie's Port-O-San guy and its peace-sign-flashing nuns.

Joe Williams

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Taiwanese director Ang Lee sees the '60s through a rose-colored telephoto lens, but his sympathetic spirit extends the generous message of the hippie era like a passed joint.

Peter Rainer

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Lee has always had an affinity for innocence and an abiding affection for outcasts, and both traits serve him well in Taking Woodstock -- but only up to a point. Beyond that point, where sanctification meets reality, the film floats up, up, and away.

Keith Phipps

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Lees movie is pleasant enough, but its too swept up in the spirit its celebrating to ask the relevant questions.

Roger Ebert

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Taking Woodstock has the freshness of something being created, not remembered.

Michael Phillips

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This is very light material, and, unusually for a Lee picture, not everybody in the ensemble appears to be acting in the same universe, let alone the same story. On the other hand: Its fun.

Melissa Anderson

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Little music from the concert itself is heard. On display instead are inane, occasionally borderline offensive portrayals of Jews, performance artists, trannies, Vietnam vets, squares, and freaks.

Mick LaSalle

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If you've ever wondered what it would be like to be there - to actually be there, man - this movie gets it.

Chad S

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Music wafts over a lake teeming with skinny-dippers. "Three days of peace and music" is unfolding at Max Yasgur's farm without us; we're not there to see Richie Havens open the festival, or anybody else take the stage, for that matter. That's because Elliott Teichberg(Demitri Martin) is always hanging around his parents, even after he takes his first tab of acid. "Taking Woodstock" will be a bad trip for those of you expecting nostalgia for dummies. Admittedly, there's no vicarious thrill in watching concert planners plan; we want Jimi; we want Janis, or rather, their thoughtful impersonators. The filmmaker acts as if he couldn't secure the rights to the music. The only live music in "Taking Woodstock" is performed by some amateur band at a warm-up concert for the locals. It's worse than watching Gwynneth Paltrow recite Sylvia Plath-like poetry in Christine Jeffs' compromised film(2003's "Sylvia") about the suicidal poetess. We want the real thing(real poetry, real rock lyricism) not some knock-off, as a payoff to all the minutae that went into mounting a large-scale undertaking like Woodstock. Told in the filmic language of Michael Wadleigh's documentary, the split-screen technique unintentionally parodies "Woodstock" instead of paying homage to the 1970 film, because what it documents seems so mundane and uncinematic. To our disappointment, the little people never give way to the stars. "Taking Woodstock" is limited by a protagonist who loves Judy Garland more than Joan Baez. Elliott's indifference to rock and roll forces the filmmaker to create a period piece movie without a glut of corresponding music as shorthand for establishing time and place. There's no Buffalo Springfield at his disposal; he achieves the look and feel of the sixties almost solely through "mis-en-scene", best exemplified in the scene where we see a late-sixties time capsule as shifting panorama, while Elliott is being escorted to the concert by a motorcycle cop. For what it's worth, "Taking Woodstock" succeeds, even though we're mad at Elliott for not getting us anywhere near the stage.

Kirk Honeycutt

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It's a low-wattage film about a high-wattage event. Which is somewhat disappointing, though you do get a thoughtful, playful, often amusing film about what happened backstage at one of the '60s' great happenings.

Scott Tobias

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Taking Woodstock has a winning generosity of spirit, but even that serves chiefly to underline the film's curious inconsequentiality, as if it were a two-hour pilot for a show about a charmingly eccentric family and a rotating cast of colorful guest stars.

comments comments

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This was a lazy, charmless, unfocused, first draft of a movie, with an unusual axe to grind against old jews, upstate locals, avant garde theater troupers and nearly everyone else who fell into the sites of the filmmakers. for the life of me i cannot understand why people as sharp as ang lee and james schamus would roll film on something so unfinished and immature.

Chris Kaltenbach

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A love letter to the time, and the period, and the legend that has grown around both. Maybe it's all too wonderful to be true, but that's OK. If Taking Woodstock is a fantasy, then it's a most benevolent one, and more power to it.

Wesley Morris

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This is as safe and sweet a movie as you could make about Americas sex-drugs-and-rock n roll-est event.

Beth C.

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This is a charming, delightful summer breeze of a film. It's an interesting story of the background of Woodstock for anybody who lived through the 1960's, saw Michael Wadleigh's documentary, or is otherwise interested in the Woodstock festival. Ang Lee does a great job of evoking that place and time. There are some great actors in this, particularly Imelda Staunton, who makes Elliot's iracsible, eccentric mother understandable and believable. Yes, Elliot never gets inside the festival grounds while the concert is going on, but most of the thousands of people who flocked to the area didn't, either. This film almost makes you feel like you're there with Elliot. This is not Ang Lee's best film, but it was more fun than anything else I saw this summer.

Billy S.

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2 hours of Peace, Love & Music, it's not Woodstock, but it's always in the vincinity of that historic weekend, just over the hill. At the shabby upstate New York hotel El Monaco, Ang Lee sets us on a beautiful, nostalic journey to the origins of the festival full of hippies, cops, drugs, and upset locals. Demetri Martin is wonderful as the young Elliot, who volunteers his parents hotel to be home base for the promoters, Liev Schreiber is a scene-stealer as a transvestite security guard and Emile Hirsch as a Vietnam vet is heartbreaking. Taking Woodstock is a glorious celebration of its own and, may I add, that it has the best, most authentic acid trip ever captured on film! Far out man.

Stephanie Zacharek

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So gentle it barely has enough vitality to stick to the screen.

Stephen Holden

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This likable, humane movie is not an attempt to recreate the epochal Woodstock Music and Art Fair captured in Michael Wadleighs documentary Woodstock. It is essentially a small, intimate film into which is fitted a peripheral view of the landmark event.

Shawn Levy

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Somehow Lee fails to make it speak to us. His heart is in the right place, but like many of the crowd that swarmed Yasgur's farm, he has rather lost his head.

Lou Lumenick

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Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock achieves an amazing feat: It turns the fabled music festival, a key cultural moment of the late 20th century, into an exceedingly lame, heavily clichd, thumb-sucking bore.

Rene Rodriguez

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Awfully amiable and dull. Instead of honoring musical gods, the film seems to think Pat Boone was headlining.

Dana Stevens

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No one's asking for a song-by-song re-enactment of the concert, but Lee's refusal to focus even for a moment on the musical aspect of the festival starts to feel almost perverse, as if he's deliberately frustrating the audience's desire.

Claudia Puig

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This is Woodstock from another perspective -- one without Jimi Hendrix or Janis Joplin.

Betsy Sharkey

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It's a frustrating complication of a movie with a sprawling story and grand ambitions -- and some truly grand acting -- that stumbles almost as often as it soars. Bummer.

Andrea Gronvall

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The screenplay is sharp and insightful, the period details ring true, and Martin is appealing as a dreamer conflicted about his homosexuality. But once the action shifts from the town to the festival, any momentum gets lost in a psychedelic haze.

Rick Groen

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Ultimately, even Lee appears to lose interest, flashing none of his usual visual panache and, at the end, content to forego any considered conclusion for a hunk of lumpy irony.

Jan Y

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Just by looking at the film's title, it's as clear as daylight to see that the film is really not about the actual Woodstock concert! It's amazing that it has to take a Taiwanese Director to offer us Americans an insight to how the Woodstock Music and Arts Destival was taken from Walkill to Bethal. Ang Lee's film brings the characters in Eliot Tiber's book to life on-screening, exactly the way I had perceived the characters in the book. Even Imelda Staunton's Sonia is as weird, ill-bred, and manipulative as the book's character. While the book is congested with an abundance of events surrounding the childhood and adult life of Elliot Tiber aka Elli Teichberg, I am thankful for the adherence of the film story to events of Tiber associated to the origination of the festival. I would recommend Tiber's book to be read before seeing the film, and be alerted to the understanding that the film's characters are pretty much based on real characters, described by Tiber of himself and those who were around him or were involved in taking the Woodstock festival to Bethal. As a film based on Tiber's book of the same title, I was not in the least bit disappointed. The actors played their parts to a tee, not missing out on the personalities and traits of their role characters.

David K

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This movie is an unqualified disaster. The script makes no sense. You never care about the main character and his relationship with his parents and Dimitri Martin never conveys anything but a blank look. Compared to the weirdly dramatic emoting of his parents, it is, as one reviewer said, that they are not in the same movie. And in the end, despite Ang Lee's attention to the background details, the scope of the event is never conveyed. The one shot of the mass of people is unconvincing.It needed one large overhead shot or something.anyway, Ang Lee will be great again, but he is not here.

James Berardinelli

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The movie hits its stride when it deals directly with the concert. The more peripheral Elliot is to the story, the better things become.

Lawrence Toppman

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Ang Lee adds to the mythology with the sweet, gentle Taking Woodstock.

Adam L

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This was filmed like an amateur hour mini-series or something. I was constantly aware and annoyed by the meaningless split-screen shots. Basically its like a made-for-TV-movie with a lot of hokey "find yourself" cliches in it. And while we're on the subject of cliches, I counted over 12 different stereotype characters in this movie, ie: The Italian Gangster, Jewish Mother etc (you can count them yourself and play a sort of "Where's Waldo of Finding All the Cliche's in this film. ) I had a good laugh , and enjoyed the Liev Schrieber cross dresser characater though. (Cliche #6). Don't see this movie, unless maybe you are taking your Mom from the Baby Boomer generation. She might like all the predictable cliches.

Owen Gleiberman

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Lee captures the fractious, joyful, monstrously evolving mass it all was.

Marjorie Baumgarten

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Elliots coming-out story is mostly shunted into the films latter half, and when it does emerge it is woefully conventional and diluted by other goings-on.

Peter Travers

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The film's major sin of omission: the music.

Keith Uhlich

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Lee and Schamus make history blandly palatable; in the process, they rob the times and the people theyre portraying of their complications.

Ann Hornaday

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A choppy and occasionally unsure film, one that doesn't achieve the superb tonal control of "The Ice Storm," but that certainly doesn't represent an unqualified disaster on a par with Lee's first attempt at the western, "Ride With the Devil."