Sweetand MuddyBy John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time," "Cinema Classics," and "On the Marquee"
"Even Woodstock turned out to be a disaster. Everybody was stuck in the mud and people got sick." Johnny Rivers
Without the music of Joplin, Hendrix, or Dylan this depiction of the rising energy of the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival seems no more than the account of putting together any concert set in a New York meadow in the late sixties. Yet it retains the wonder of the young people, for whom freedom was truly "another word for nothing left to lose."
Eliot Teichberg (Demetri Martin) is as laid back as actor Elliot Gould of that era, helping his parents navigate the daunting sea of troubles for a concert on their Catskills farm that will host hundreds of thousands of hippies and hoodlums, all dedicated to profiting spiritually or financially from what looked like a small event until it became a part of the lexicon and imagination of the modern American rebellious age. In a way, the Teichbergs' saving their farm in White Lake, N.Y. represents the salvation of America from the horrors of Vietnam and assassinations.
Director Ang Lee, who has helmed much more powerful fare such as Brokeback Mountain and Crouching Tiger, still has a winning way with characters as he highlights their individual charms and weaknesses set against a much broader cultural canvas. Eliot can be an ambitious Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) in The Graduate; Liev Schrieber's cross-dressing Vilma comingles the sex and security of the freedom movement; Imelda Staunton's over-the-top angry mother of Eliot is a worst-case of a mother fighting change and a good actress poorly directed. Lee is at his best when he directs the crowd making fun with the mud and muck on the rain-soaked field.
The aftermath may not resemble the end of the Civil War as in Gone with the Wind, but it does have the afterglow of a culture that has had a considerble orgasm.
It feels pretty good 40 years later when fighting for freedom just ain't the same.
John DeSando teaches film at Franklin University and co-hosts WCBE 90.5's It's Movie Time, Cinema Classics, and On the Marquee, which can be heard streaming at http://publicbroadcasting.net/wcbe/ppr/index.shtml and on demand at http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wcbe/arts.artsmain Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.RR.com