Based on a book by the same name, Taking Woodstock puts together the series of unremarkable events that led up to a music festival that remains as remarkable now as it was then. It was a time of great distress in America — the Vietnam War was sending back bodies and scarred soldiers — as well as a time of great hope — Neil Armstrong was about to set off for the moon. In this climate, a purely commercial venture promising three days of music and peace, featuring the likes of Joan Baez, Janis Joplin and Bob Dylan if they were lucky, brought 500,000 in cars and vans and on foot streaming to the small hamlet of White Lake in Catskills.

Ang Lee begins quite nicely, with Elliot Teichberg (Martin) and his parents at their rundown motel, which is as big on ambition as it is far from realising it. Elliot himself wrote the book Taking Woodstock, and it’s a real account — apart from a few disputed facts — of the festival.

Given the number of motels in the sleepy town, the Teichberg venture doesn’t earn anything. There is heavy mortgage to pay off and Elliot’s miserly mother Sonia (Staunton) is loathe putting any of her money back into the place. An artist doing well in New York, Elliot moves back to Catskills to help his parents out with the motel. The quiet but undeterred young man has also been chosen as the head of the local chamber of commerce, whose meetings draw a motley group of old retirees and one ambitious couple, each pushing their own agendas, that too half-heartedly.

... contd.