Taking Woodstock is an unbelievable film purely because it has achieved the impossible: It has managed to portray the most infamously exciting cultural event of the century as profoundly and extraordinarily boring.
The movie poster, with its multicolored, kaleidoscopic design, promises us a psychedelic tour of the musical phantasmagoria that was Woodstock. In reality, we get an almost documentary-style portrayal of the tedious details of accommodating half a million hippies on a farm.
The movie centers around Elliot Tiber, a young man who moves back in with his parents to help them with their struggling, dilapidated motel business and save them from financial ruin. In an attempt to do so, he ends up inviting Woodstock to his sleepy small town.
The beginning drags on as Elliot and company work on the logistics of housing a festival - think small town politics and land permit problems. But it's not until half the movie has passed in this way, and Woodstock still hasn't arrived, that we begin to realize what we have gotten ourselves into. I'm all for defying literary conventions, but generally, a movie that is just one long exposition without a climax is doomed to disappoint. This rambling, meandering exposition sets us up for a big finish - not because of any particular foreshadowing, but because we assume that something has to happen eventually - but quite literally goes nowhere.
I don't think I'll be spoiling anything - in fact, I might be sparing you from dashed anticipations - when I tell you that Elliot infuriatingly never goes to the concert. He sets out to do so each of the three days but always gets detained by other things, like mud-sliding and hippies that get generous with their drugs, resulting in an awkward tripped-out scene that consisted of actors lolling their heads and staring at the ceiling for 10 minutes.
For a movie about Woodstock, the music festival seems to be merely a subplot. The real story is supposed to be Elliot's coming-of-age as he becomes liberated from his parents. Imeda Staunton does a good job as his domineering, trollish mother, with all the spitefulness (and frumpiness) of her role as Professor Dolores Umbridge in the fifth Harry Potter movie. She is particularly good, if a little frightening, in perhaps the movie's only funny scene, in which both of Elliot's ancient, dreary parents dance in the rain after unknowingly eating pot-laced brownies. Many potentially fascinating secondary characters are introduced, such as Elliot's flash-backing Vietnam veteran friend, a transvestite bodyguard and a nudist theater troupe, but they are promptly pushed out of the limelight so that the story can focus solely on Elliot. This choice is a lot like centering a true-crime thriller about the guy who does the police paperwork. It's not a good idea.
Demetri Martin, the actor who plays Elliot - and a well-known comedian, ironically - does little more than stand there in his awkward, stoop-shouldered way with a lobotomized look on his face. In a way, he represents all of us sitting in the audience, bored out of our minds, with the very same look on our faces.
So, in the end, Taking Woodstock begs the question: How could a screenwriter produce such a disoriented, rambling movie that so readily squanders all of its potential? I think we can rule out drugs as the cause because, if that was the case, I think the story would have turned out to be a lot more interesting.
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