Academy Award-winning director Ang Lee based his new fictional narrative film, Taking Woodstock, on the memoir of the same name by Elliot Tiber (née Teichberg), who helped run his parents’ run-down Catskills resort and became the local fixer for the staging of the truly epochal 1969 Woodstock Music and Art Fair.
The film follows the adventures of Elliot (comedian Demetri Martin), a struggling painter, interior designer and closeted gay man (in his Catskills environs), who earns the enmity of the locals by helping a group of hip capitalists and their Wall Street backers gain approval for the mega-rock show. Jewish dairy farmer Max Yasgur (Eugene Levy) offers his pasture, a beautiful natural amphitheater, as the site for the three-day concert that would become emblematic of the counter-culture that arose in opposition to the Vietnam War and everything straitlaced and square.
The tension between Elliot and his old-school parents, Jake and Sonia Teichberg (Henry Goodman and Imelda Staunton), forms the narrative arc of Taking Woodstock. Struggling to keep their family business, the El Monaco Motel, afloat, the elder Teichbergs see a money-making opportunity with the crew from Woodstock Ventures, which delivers a brown paper bag full of cash to lease the entire motel for the season.
Complications ensue when the “hippie invasion” commences, and the Catskills are overrun by dope-smoking, skinny-dipping, fornicating kids. (“No shtupping in the bushes!” yells Sonia Teichberg, as she wields a long stick against an uninhibited couple.) The music takes a back seat to family drama and the culture clash that is played for laughs.
The cast also includes Dan Fogler, Jonathan Groff,  Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Emile Hirsch, and Liev Schreiber, as Vilma, a transsexual former Marine and Korean War vet.
It’s a pretty groovy flick, man. — Mordecai Specktor
