Ang Lee’s movie ‘Taking Woodstock’ has garnered mainly negative reviews but I found it a warm-hearted and intelligent study of this key event in America’s cultural history.
I guess many of the critics were disappointed that Lee made no attempt to capture the performances at the festival although I think he made the right decision here. If you want to see these, there’s already the concert film – a fictional recreation would at best have been superfluous, at worst embarrassing.
What the movie centres on is the spirit of the times in what was the biggest be-in ever; a 3 day event that briefly seemed to symbolise a shift in the country’s mood away from cynicism and selfishness towards peace, love and understanding.
Viewed with the benefit of hindsight, the inclusion of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s Wooden Ships on the soundtrack is portentous; set on its blissful course with “a fair wind, blowin’ warm”, these vessels turned out to be too fragile to bring about any significant social change. Two decades on, Neil Young would write “the wooden ships are a hippie dream” as the paradise got sucked into the machine. By then, Woodstock had met its anathema in the form of Altamont and any lingering hopes that loving awareness would produce a new spirit of harmony and understanding were dashed.
Ang Lee doesn’t offer any rose-tinted rewriting of history but neither does he present the event from a cynic’s perspective. He adopts a nostalgic reflection on the past and rightly recognises that this festival wasn’t so much about seeing the artists perform at the concert; but more about being part of the world’s greatest ‘happening’.
