‘Taking Woodstock’: Mythologizing the Worst Generation
by John NolteIn the late 1960s there were young people in college and starting families, young people far from home fighting and dying for the sovereignty of our allies in Vietnam, young people just starting to see results from their brave and noble fight for Civil Rights, and then there were the dirty, filthy hippies – the most spoiled, narcissistic, ungrateful species in the history of mankind – whose legacy of drug addiction, STDs, the misery of single motherhood and 2 million left dead on the Killing Fields of Cambodia, still reverberates forty years on.
Ang Lee’s “Taking Woodstock,” a halfway competent but ultimately erratic, unfocused story of how “three days of peace and music” came to the small town of White Lake, New York and changed for the better the lives of those who embraced “the spirit,” not only celebrates the drug abuse and loveless sex that defined the “Woodstock Generation,” but goes beyond caricatures and into outright anti-Semitism to condemn those who didn’t.
Elliot Tiber (Demetri Martin), a young Jewish man in his early twenties, once again abandons his work as a struggling Greenwich Village artist to help his elderly parents (two Jewish stereotypes played by Henry Goodman and Imelda Staunton) through another summer season in the Catskills. Their “resort,” a filthy, dilapidated motel, is about to be foreclosed on and probably should be, but Elliott convinces an exasperated banker to give him one more season. But foreclosure is inevitable and Elliot knows it, and while his friends go to San Francisco with flowers in their hair, his dreams take a back seat to this annual guilt trip sponsored by his overbearing mother. (more…)
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