TAKING WOODSTOCK

Taking Woodstock feels like Ang Lee taking a break from heavy-handed dramas like Brokeback Mountain or Lust, Caution. This movie is a breezy comedy that is as easy-going as a stoner watching the world go by. In the case of Elliot Tiber, whose parents' motel is ground zero for the festival, that is exactly what happens.

The whole film centers around Elliot (Demetri Martin). He is guilted into coming from the big city, where he works as an interior designer, and help out at home. Home just happens to be the dilapitated Catskills motel called the El Monaco that may as well have tumbleweeds rolling by and frogs croaking from the fetid pool. Elliot, in his weary earnestness to help his parents (Henry Goodman and Imelda Staunton, who kind of overacts), even heads the city council in White Lake, NY to try to figure some way to bring tourists in.

Suddenly the opportunity falls into the town's lap, like a discarded newspaper. Turns out the neighboring town first accepted, then rejected a large planned music festival featuring a bunch of groovy bands that those hippie kids were diggin'. The promoters start scrambling (as tickets had already been sold), with the fest was mere weeks away, and Elliot gets an idea, so crazy that it just might work. Next thing you know, a helicopter is landing in the dirt lot in front of the El Dorado, and hot shot concert organizers and promoters, like foxy hippie-dude Michael Lang (foxy Jonathan Groff), are asking to rent out the motel for the rest of the summer to use as headquarters. Um. OK!

Taking Woodstock is almost a collage of busy-ness. If it were a documentary, it could almost be a how-to guide on the many many things that need to be considered for such a big event. Is the headquarters' building up to code? Is there enough drinking water? Toilets? What about security? Tickets? Who is going to do PR (Elliot falls into this role in a hilariously memorable press conference scene)? And who is going to clean up when all is said and done? That said, the film is a collage of characters, from the messed-up Vietnam vet who is a hometown boy (Emile Hirsh), to the farm owner that is savvy when negotiating to rent out his land (Eugene Levy, playing it straight for once), to the hippie girlfriend of the promoter whose job it seems it to chill (Mamie Gummer, daughter of Meryl Streep), to the transvestive security enforcement Vilma (Liev Schrieber, who is simply adorable, and is the warm soul of the film).

Curiously (and probably for copyright reasons), Taking Woodstock, from what I could tell, doesn't even show any footage from the concert itself. It occasionally uses the split-screen gimmick that was famously used in Woodstock documentary, but you have expect to see glimpses of Santana or Hendrix or Joe Cocker. Nope. Instead, like Elliot, we experience Woodstock as the concert we never really got to see, just like him. His closest brush is through a psychedelic haze from a great distance. He can see the lights of the far off stage and the masses and masses of people, rippling like waves in the sea. And you know what? That worked for me. For most people, that is probably as close to the action they got as well, which just lends the whole story a slightly melancholy "It's all good" shrug and smile, as the final stragglers wander away, ready to face the world again.