Ang Lee (2009)
Ang Lee has been quoted in interviews as saying that he was attracted to this project partly to break a sequence of demanding dramas. Since he moved to America in the mid-1990s Lee has made seven films: Sense and Sensibility (1995), The Ice Storm (1997), Ride with the Devil (1999), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Hulk (2003), Brokeback Mountain (2005) and Lust, Caution (2007). Not of all them would seem to qualify as wrenching or heavyweight but you see what Lee means. Taking Woodstock is the (true) story of how, in August 1969, a young man called Elliot Tiber offered his family’s rundown motel in White Lake, in the small town of Bethel, New York, as the base for the organisers of Woodstock (The concert took place on nearby farmland.) It may be facile to say so but Lee looks to have decided that one way of recreating the zeitgeist is not to think incisively: the picture is a vague mess. And perhaps he’s not a natural director of comedy. The script, by his long-time collaborator James Schamus (based on a book by Elliot Tiber and Tom Monte), may be the root of the problem but Lee hasn’t orchestrated the performances – as if there were no need for discipline in a piece that’s essentially light-hearted.
The first half of the film describes the machinations of various interested parties in White Lake and their motives for promoting or opposing the Woodstock Festival: the material is designed for laughs but delivers next to none. The smaller parts tend to be written and performed as if for sketches. These characters don’t come over as enjoyably incidental and passing through the action – they rather perform their piece then disappear. After an hour or so, Elliot, his father and a transvestite security guard called Vilma are talking by the side of a lake full of happily nude bathers and hear the sounds of the concert in the distance. The father tells his son to go there and enjoy himself and at this point Taking Woodstock lurches abruptly into a life-changing-experience story. By the end, Schamus is dropping lead weight ironies into the script: the concert organiser Michael Lang tells Elliot that he and his pals are now off to plan an even greater happening – in California, with the Rolling Stones. Altamont, which took place in December 1969, was marred by violence and murder. The final shots of clearing up after the show at Woodstock has ended are bathed in a golden glow – the sun setting on an age of innocence.
There are promising elements in the screenplay but they tend to backfire. Making this a ‘backstage’ story, rather than relying on footage from the actual concert, is a brave idea – but without anything providing a centre instead of the music that made Woodstock a legendary event, and without any engaging characters (Woodstock is a long way from Nashville), the courage counts for nothing. (Danny Elfman’s pleasant score is not enough to ward off increasing frustration that you’re not hearing any of the actual Woodstock performers.) The logistics of the production must have been challenging and the slow progress of human traffic and a jam of cars en route to the concert is well staged. As he proved in the memorable scene in Brokeback Mountain in which the two men on horseback and the sheep they’re herding travel uphill, Lee has a real talent for showing things slowly on the move. Here, Eric Gautier’s camera moves along a procession of different people and vehicles and placards and buildings. The sequence is flowing and natural (so unlike, say, the display of the Dunkirk set design and decoration in Atonement). But things keep fizzling out in Taking Woodstock – without their inconsequentiality or obliqueness itself giving pleasure. We’re introduced early on to a local theatre group who perform naked. When they launch (clothed) into their adaptation of Three Sisters, it’s obvious what will happen so you expect some kind of amusing twist. The group’s confrontational prologue addressed to their audience – ‘You are the watched, we will judge you’ – is fine as a comical evocation of contemporary ‘radical’ theatre. But when they then strip off all that happens is a bit of perfunctory frenetic action, with a few members of the audience joining in and no one else appearing to care one way or the other.
The generation gap between the characters seems to be established by performance style. Most of the young actors are either indefinite (Demetri Martin as Elliot) or overemphatic (Emile Hirsch as Elliot’s high school contemporary, Billy) or both (Jonathan Groff as Michael Lang, although his face – that of a calculating flower child – is ideal). Martin, whom I’d not seen before and who is best known as a stand-up comic, is too dry at the start and lacks the strength of personality needed to shoulder Elliot’s coming of age in the second half. Young Elliot is the President of the Bethel Chamber of Commerce. If Demetri Martin had suggested some kind of commercial appetite as the story was being set up that might at least have given Elliot the scope for entertaining metamorphosis once he’s imbibed the hippie ethos. The senior actors are over the top – partly as a result of the wan presence of the youngsters, partly because James Schamus has written them as ethnic stereotypes: Elliot’s parents are Russian Jewish immigrants and the script has no qualms about showing his mother as abrasively money-grubbing. I felt sorry for Imelda Staunton in the role: her playing isn’t crude but it’s so theatrically detailed and energetic that, with a lot of limp characterisation going on around her, Staunton becomes effortful. As her husband, Henry Goodman is surprisingly subdued in the early stages but it’s only a matter of time before normal service is resumed and he starts overdoing the old man’s arthritic movement and Ashkenazy emotionalism. You laugh when you first see this pair smooching after they’ve eaten ‘hash brownies’ but not for as long as their doped routine goes on. (One good thing about seeing Staunton and Goodman together, though, is that it recalls their happy partnership as Miss Adelaide and Nathan Detroit in the National Theatre’s Guys and Dolls in the 1990s.) There are some compensations in the cast, particularly Liev Schreiber as the transvestite Vilma, who is easily empathetic and comically focused. Paul Dano and Kelli Garner, the couple with whom Elliott shares his first acid trip, pair up well; Dano seems like a pleasantly dazed cherub. Eugene Levy is the affably mercenary owner of the dairy farm where the concert takes place. As Lang’s assistant, Mamie Gummer does pretty well with an uninspired ‘kook’ role. She has a little of her mother’s edge and this gives a tension to Gummer’s scenes that’s a welcome contrast to the prevailing insipidness.
In an interview in The Big Issue, Lee talked about his own memories of Woodstock as a fourteen-year-old in Taiwan. While the long hair of Western youngsters was, to a Taiwanese teenager, unthinkably liberated, Lee remembers being puzzled by the significance of Eastern religions, elements of the cultural establishment in his part of the world, as expressions of the counterculture in America. Imparting something of his personal memories of Woodstock into this film may well have been easier said than done; but the vaguely reminiscent texture that Lee has created amounts to a forced connection with the Woodstock Festival that doesn’t exist for him. Elliot’s acid trip is one of the best bits in Taking Woodstock because you sense Lee at a distance from it, trying to imagine what it was like – as a result, he puts himself into the sequence more expressively. When he resorts, as he regularly does, to split-screen shots, he seems less to be capturing the spirit of the age than merely replicating what became one of the more tedious conventions of American cinema of the decade.
I remember having a not dissimilar feeling when I watched The Ice Storm – a feeling that Lee was remaking a type of early 1970s movie about an American family whose dysfunction was meant to reflect something in the national psyche of the time. Brokeback Mountain was a very different matter and a much more individual story, in which the treatment of the characters qua American film types had a subversive edge. Lee does seem to have a continuing affinity with homosexual feelings. It’s striking how Taking Woodstock sharpens focus in the couple of moments that suggest that Elliot is gay (at other moments he comes over as borderline asexual). I’m not saying that Lee needs this as a subject to express himself as an artist but his lack of conflicted feelings in this latest picture certainly amounts to a serious loss of energy. Taking a break from anguish perhaps doesn’t suit Ang Lee. Some filmmakers just aren’t themselves when they’re not under the emotional cosh.
16 November 2009
