Caught in the devil's bargain: Taking Woodstock

Would-be interior designer and might-be abstract painter Elliot Tiechberg (Demetri Martin) gets starved out of New York City at the start of a very un-groovy summer of ’69. He heads back to the Catskills, where his folks run a fleabag motel and self-described resort that even at eight bucks a night can’t draw customers. Though he’s in his mid-30s Elliot looks younger. Though he’s secretly a less than straight arrow under his polyester suits he looks sufficiently trustworthy to his elders, or at least those who aren’t openly anti-Semitic. Elliot’s the youngest-ever president of the local chamber of commerce, a thankless gig whose greatest benefit is a free pass when it comes to getting permits approved. But permits and sheer desperation are all Elliot needs to help grease the wheels of history and ensure that Woodstock happens after the festival gets booted out of its original location. Elliot’s acting as middleman between the locals and the organizers also saves his family’s business and gives him an opportunity to finally break away from a vicious circle of codependence and repression. So everybody wins. At least until Altamont comes in December and bums the whole universe out.

Taking Woodstock is based on the memoir by Elliot Tiber. I’ve been wondering why his name was altered here to sound more explicitly Jewish. I can only assume it has something to do with justifying the wildly over-the-top characterization of his mom Sonia (Imelda Staunton, no holds barred), whose knee-highs, horn-rimmed goggles, incessant nagging and permanent lunge make her the most extreme overbearing Jewish matriarch the movies have seen in years. It may very well be an accurate portrait of this most unlikely midwife of one of the hippy generation’s crowning achievements, but it also makes for some broad and rather uneven comedy, which is not the strong suit of director Ang Lee, who along with his screenwriter/producer James Schamus was probably more attracted to the story’s mixture of sexual awakening and dissection of a pivotal moment in American culture. You could say Taking Woodstock is a little Brokeback and a little Ice Storm, but you wouldn’t quite do justice to the film’s own distinctions—or to the richer rewards of Brokeback Mountain or The Ice Storm, both of them movies with more focus, insight and emotional punch.

Better to just say that Taking Woodstock is a reasonably good time, with some nice details, lots of nudity, heady nostalgia, more than a handful of freak flag clichés and a paucity of actual music, the idea being that those who in attendance who actually heard the bands were in the minority. Elliot never quite gets near the stage but he does strike up an alliance with amiable neighbour Eugene Levy, get some solid advice from a ass-kicking transvestite played by Liev Schreiber, crawl into a boogie van for a pleasantly touchy-feely acid trip with Paul Dano, and tumbles out of the closet and into bed with a hippy hunk who is quite possibly the only guy who went to Woodstock that actually likes Judy Garland records. There’s not a heap of narrative dynamics here, but like Titanic we all know how it’s going to end anyway. A psychedelic cascade of split-screen effects followed by one massive, mud-splattered hangover.

Defiance: saving lives, forest wives and reversing stereotypes in this untold tale of Holocaust survival

The title sounds like some vehicle for Stallone, or maybe the Rock, but Defiance in fact belongs to the new crop of revisionist WWII/Holocuast movies, an epic of resistance, survival and self-determination. It’s based on an astonishing and largely unknown true story, astonishing in part because its portrayal of the abysmal suffering of Europe’s Jews is given fresh dynamic in the shape of Belarusian brothers Tuvia, Zus and Asael Bielski, three handsome boys of durable Jewish peasant stock who lose everything in the German invasion save their lives and dignity. You have to marvel and just how rare it is in movies to find such a characterization of the Jews, not as a mass of helpless victims, but as tough motherfuckers.

Having fled their homes, the Bielskis original plan was, understandably, founded in self-interest. But their encounters with other Jews hiding in the Belarusian woods tugs at their sense of solidarity and purpose. Surrounded by trembling, dirt-smeared faces gnawing on scraps of petrified bread, Zus (Liev Schreiber) wonders: “So many dead. Why not us?” The movie is of course one long answer to this question. Where Zus believes the only viable moral option is to fight as partisans alongside the Russians, Tuvia (Daniel Craig) resolves to stay hidden and build a community where every last Jew, from the able-bodied to the infirm, has some chance at survival, however remote. This theme of aggression versus seclusion is given its boldest dramatization in a sequence that shifts back and forth between a Russian-Partisan ambush on a German convoy and a wedding ceremony held in the forest enclave, both effectively staged and given engaging visual arcs by director and co-scenarist Edward Zwick, who previously helmed such like fare as Glory (1989), Legends of the Fall (94), The Last Samurai (03) and Blood Diamond (06).

Other scenes in Defiance however, ones that require greater reflection, tend to be more ham-fisted. Some are entirely unnecessary, like the dumb-ass scene where Bella (Iben Hjejle) asks Zus why the women don’t get guns. Zus simply assures her that the men will protect her, and this chauvinist brush-off, rather than leading to further discussion, touches Bella so deeply that she lets Zus cop a feel. (Does that mean she's Zus' "forest wife?" Lots of the fellows take forest wives, like participants in some prototype for a Pacific Northwest commune. It might have been interesting to learn more about the postwar fates of these forest marriages.) 

With its overused and overly instructive James Newton Howard score, its declamatory, overstated dialogue—which awkwardly avoids contractions as a way of reminding us that the characters aren’t actually supposed to be speaking English—Defiance sort of plods along, very respectful and workmanlike for the most, yet at heart there remains this iconoclastic appendix to the Holocaust narrative that’s worth knowing, not to mention yet another superbly rich performance from Craig, who swings convincingly between that steely gaze that exudes Bond know-how and a sense of desperation and terrible doubt as to what to do with all these people shriveling up from hunger and despair.