It's 1969. Elliot Teichberg (Demetri Martin) struggles to keep the family motel in the Catskills open. His father Jake (Henry Goodman) is quiet and mother Sonia (Imelda Staunton) is bombastic. They barely have enough to keep the motel open for the summer. When a music festival in a neighboring town gets canceled due to the mayor, Elliot has the idea to expand their tiny music festival. Farmer Max Yasgur (Eugene Levy) is trying squeeze the promoter. Michael Lang is the hip concert organizer. Local Dan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) leads the locals opposing the hippie invasion. Dan's brother Billy (Emile Hirsch) is a recently returned Vietnam vet. Vetty von Vilma (Liev Schreiber) is a transvestite who does security.

Director Ang Lee is not digging deep enough. He also keeps the movie very small in comparison to the vast cultural event. Demetri Martin doesn't have the star power to lead so many characters in such a big story. There is no tension to speak of. There is a lot of fun little touches but none of it really grabs me. I also expect more music from a movie about Woodstock. This has its moments but it's a bit too light-weight.

The movie was panned by professional and amateur critics alike when it came out because it didn't focus on the music. If that's what you want, might as well go for the real thing with the actual "Woodstock" film that came out a year after the 'Aquarian Music and Arts Festival" was held. What surprises me as I come to this picture on IMDb, is that there are more reviews for this one than there is for the 'real thing' (73 to 69 as I write this)! Seriously, for those complaining, see the original.

I guess that's one of the reason I held off watching for so long until today, so in a way I'm somewhat guilty of my own criticism. But with all the junk I've watched and reviewed on IMDb in recent years, I didn't see how viewing the film would be a time waster. And I'm actually glad I did, as it brought back a lot of the memories of fifty years ago, growing up in a small town about fifty miles from Bethel, New York. The local hype had a way of accelerating the further you drove up Route 17 into the Catskills, until, as you observe in the picture, the local roads and highways become virtual parking lots. It's always difficult to know how much of a picture 'inspired by a true story' is actually real or not, but the way Elliot Teichberg (Demetri Martin) and his family are portrayed in the film is probably pretty close. Completely overwhelmed by the onslaught of humanity that descended on this small, rural community, one can only gaze on in fascination as the event takes on a life of it's own with laid back promoter Michael Lang (Jonathan Groff) keeping an open mind and taking it all in stride.

One quirky thing about the casting for this picture - for a while I thought that Robert De Niro might have been lurking under the scraggly beard of Elli's father Jake, but it turned out to be actor Henry Goodman. Seems to me he could be a De Niro stand-in. Imelda Staunton makes it easy for the viewer to dislike Elli's Mom, right up until that scene where she and Jake get the Woodstock vibe from a batch of marijuana brownies. That was a cool scene, as was Liv Schreiber's take on Viet Nam vet Vilma von Vetta; try saying that ten times fast. For his part, Demetri Martin seemed to be in over his head as an actor portraying Elliot, and maybe that was the idea, because most anyone caught up in the local hysteria would have been mind numbed to some degree.

So if I were to recommend the picture, it would be with the proviso to see 1970's "Woodstock" as well, either before or after so as not to miss out on the concert experience. In which case, the irony of a statement from one of the concert organizers is given added resonance - "Hey, it's August. It's not gonna rain."

Ang Lee and James Schamus like their hippie culture, and love themselves that August 1969 summer of Woodstock, and also the act of trying to capture it on film as it was to be there, on the outside and suddenly coming into the fold of looking in. One can feel the love for the period, the people, the music, the drugs, the whole scene, man. If it doesn't make for the greatest movie it might just be cause Lee has decided to make a precisely light-hearted affair with some fun moments but nothing really hard-hitting with its coming-of-age story. It's a been-there-done-that affair in terms of the major characters, and its more significant background subject provides more of the color and excitement in its two-hour run time.

It's basically about the people behind the scenes at Woodstock (we never see anyone famous, aside from certain semi-figures like Michael Lang and Max Yasgur, portrayed by actors),specifically the young guy Eliot who got together the Woodstock-financial people to his small town as part of Bethel, New York, and helped also to give (politely putting it) a boost to his parents' motel business. We see some of the ups and downs, the downs being things like gangsters trying to muscle their way into the earnings of the thousands of people flocking upstate to frequent the motel (and the up of getting 'security' with transvestite Liev Schreiber in an awesome performance),or just with Elliot's parents and how their attitudes stay mostly the same- what's with these damn kids and their hair and sex and drugs anyway- until towards the end of the three days of peace/love/music.

It's a funny movie for at least a good amount of its run-time. The writer Schamus knows how to milk some laughs out of small-town fears and those scenes of freak-outs that shake up the quiet veneer of rural upstate New York. One good example of this are the folks in the 'theater troupe' who live in Elliot's barn and who remind one of the mime troupe from Easy Rider (lots of naked reenactments of Chekhov). And I even liked how Martin navigates himself in scenes where he has to act perplexed but not show it too much like, "oh, hey, lots of hippies, OK, got to get back to work, whoa!" When it comes time for the more dramatically demanding scenes from Martin (a relatively inexperienced actor and mostly comedian by the way) he falls flat, or looks wonky when tripping his ass off with Paul Dano - a weird but affecting scene, by the way.

Lee decided, more or less, to just take it easy this time around. After the heavy head-trips of Hulk, Brokeback Mountain and Lust Caution, the guy needed to have a laugh, and what better way than to have some good times and breezy moments in reflecting on the one time hippies didn't get stomped down by cops or just wear lots of flowers in their hair. And when its airy and fun it works. When it tries to add some complexity (i.e. a gay innuendo moment is put out there and then never really mentioned again much to my dismay) and starts to get a little preachy towards the last quarter with Elliot having to come to terms with his life and working at his parent's motel (and discovering a dark secret about his rambunctious, irascible old Russian-Jewish mother played respectably by Imelda Staunton) it falls flat on its face. But its worth watching for those little moments - like when Elliot rides on the back of the motorcycle cop through the dense traffic of the road to the Woodstock concert. It's like the good-natured version of the traffic jam from Godard's Week End: less a-holes and more hippies.