Taking Woodstock - DVD Review

UNIVERSAL
Street: Dec. 15
Prebook: now
> Episodic, uneven drama about famed rock concert has good performances.

Landing at the nation’s box office with a resounding thud despite gobs of advertising pegged to the 40th anniversary of the legendary rock festival it depicts, Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock is a movie whose parts are better than the whole. Demetri Martin winningly plays the ambitious young Jewish man whose support of the 1969 Woodstock concert single-handedly restores his parents’ ramshackle Catskills motel to profitability and awakens him to the potential of generational change. The plot unfolds as a series of vignettes, some much better than others, and many fine actors in supporting roles—especially Liev Schreiber playing a cross-dressing security guard—barely register due to limited screen time. The concert itself is just a backdrop, represented only by fragments of background music borrowed from live recordings.

Shelf Talk: Taking Woodstock didn’t resonate with today’s movie-going demo, which skews young. Lacking big cast names, the picture will see much more action in the home arena if it’s promoted aggressively to the baby-boomer generation and those who follow the multi-genre career of director Lee (Brokeback Mountain, Sense and Sensibility).