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Even at $8 a night ($46.28 in today's dollars), the El Monaca Motel in the Catskills was not a bargain in early summer 1969. The air conditioning was non-existent, the room dirty and the towels extra, at a buck a piece.
The owners were $5,000 behind on the mortgage and ready to let the bank "take this miserable dump." Turning the business around seemed as impossible as walking on the moon, but that's what Neil Armstrong had just done.
In their own way, motel operators Jake and Sonia Teichberg (Henry Goodman and Imelda Staunton) and their son, Elliot Tiber (Demetri Martin), were pioneers in another iconic event that summer: Woodstock.
- Starring: Demetri Martin (center below), Imelda Staunton, Emile Hirsch.
- Rating: R for graphic nudity, some sexual content, drug use and language.
- Web site: 'Taking Woodstock'
Ang Lee's "Taking Woodstock," based on Tiber's book of the same name, tells the story of how three days of peace and music changed fortunes and fates.
Until half a million strong streamed into Bethel, N.Y., Max Yasgur (Eugene Levy) was known for his 600-acre dairy farm and the chocolate milk that bore his name. In fact, he serves little cartons of the cold treat to the negotiating New Yorkers as he asks questions like, "You'll clean up after yourselves, I'm hoping?"
"Taking Woodstock" is the ultimate backstory story.
Although you see the stage in the far distance -- sometimes through an acid-washed haze -- and hear some of the music, this is about everything going on around the event. Don't go expecting to see Country Joe McDonald and the Fish look-alikes, but you will hear strains of "I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag" and other signature tunes.
In a way, Lee proves what Fred Rogers once said: "I feel that the real drama of life is never center stage, it's always in the wings. It's never with the spotlight on, it's usually something that you don't expect at all."
But the wings are populated by some (not all) people who seem like flag-bearers for the time: The state trooper who looks forward to clubbing hippies but instead sports a flower on his helmet; the local (Emile Hirsch) who returned from the Vietnam War as a lost soul; the cross-dressing former Marine (Liev Schreiber) who shows up; a hippie-dippie theater troupe that drops tops and trou; and the gay workman.
I haven't read Tiber's book, subtitled "A True Story of a Riot, a Concert, and a Life," so I don't know if these characters are drawn from real life. Squeezed into a two-hour movie, the group feels slightly contrived. (The riot, by the way, refers to the Stonewall riots earlier that summer in Greenwich Village.)
In addition, Martin is not terribly dynamic as the real-life fulcrum of the tale. Or maybe it's that Staunton, in sleeveless housedress and birdseed-filled padding that weighs her down, is just so terrific, as is Goodman as her dour husband, who undergoes his own transformation.
"Taking Woodstock" is filled with period cars, clothes, hairstyles and music, but it seems too self-aware about what's to come. I enjoyed the movie, but, given the talent and timing, walked away slightly disappointed. The adults are more vividly drawn than the young people, when it should be the other way around.
