Descending on this sleepy hollow by helicopter and limousine, they are led by Michael Lang (Jonathan Groff), a shrewd hippie impresario, who incarnates both the sixties dream and its commercial sellout. As he turns the motel into the festival base camp, Tiber’s parents cash in. Slapstick ensues as they are bullied by local anti-Semites and Mafia racketeers. But salvation arrives in the form of a transvestite ex-Marine (Liev Schreiber), who takes charge of security as a cow pasture is turned into New York’s third-largest city.
Taking Woodstock, in other words, is a show about putting on a show. It’s also a rite-of-passage story about Tiber, a closeted gay, who finally wades into the festival fray, drops acid, and changes his life. Making his film debut, Demetri Martin, a comedian with his own cable show, is reminiscent of the young Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate (1967), and the reference is driven home by Simon & Garfunkel guitar riffs on the score.
Tiber’s Jewish mother comes across as a monstrous caricature, but the movie’s detailed evocation of the counterculture is surprisingly authentic, given that hippies have become a Hollywood cliché. “For Ang, the biggest task was to take on the physicality of what people in 1969 were like,” says Schamus, explaining that they were skinny without being gym-toned. “They had these natural bodies. The big joke was finding extras who weren’t shaved like porn stars.”
The extras were inculcated at “hippie camp,” but Lee was trying to capture a lost vibe, not just a period look. What mattered, he says, was “their attitude, the look on their face, the slouch—and the way they connect to each other spiritually.”
In fact, he gave the crew signed copies of Be Here Now, the 1971 bestseller by Baba Ram Dass, the former cohort of LSD guru Timothy Leary. “It’s very easy to make fun of hippie culture,” says Schamus, 49, who discovered Woodstock as a kid through his older brother’s triple-disc soundtrack on vinyl. “I spent hours listening to that album. But by the time I got to be a teenager, hippies were embarrassing. It took me many years to have an appreciation for a culture that allowed itself to be that experimental.”
The movie tries to make hippies hip again. And in Cannes its young stars said they envied a time when people got wired without technology. “If you were a 23-year-old guy in Woodstock and didn’t have a phone, you were just hanging out,” says Emile Hirsch, who portrays a shell-shocked Vietnam vet. “Whoever you were with, that’s who you were with. These days you’re with who you’re with plus the 10 people you’re text-messaging.” Martin concurs: “If you watch the Woodstock documentary, you don’t see a whole lot of people hamming it up for the camera, and they’re not putting it on their websites, because websites don’t exist. You wonder if it were happening today what it would be like. Would people be able to go beyond themselves and care about something bigger?”
Both actors agree that Barack Obama’s election was the closest thing to Woodstock they’ve experienced. “Everyone was in such an amazing mood,” says Hirsch. “You could just go up to someone you’d never met and strike up a great conversation. It was almost like Woodstock.”
Cannes, meanwhile, is about as far from Woodstock as one can imagine. At the party on the beach after Lee’s premiere, women in gowns sit at tables by the lapping surf, bent over BlackBerries as if in prayer. Lee and his stars, ushered toward couches in a VIP area, look a little dazed. You can sense a polite response, which is later confirmed when the reviews are less than ecstatic. “When you go into competition in Cannes with a comedy,” says Schamus, “you are walking with a target on your back, because you’re not living up to the high seriousness of your station. I thought Americans would go for it. As it happens, every country in the world except the U.S. went for it.”
In a quiet corner of the party, a couple of veteran distributors share a joint, complain about critics, and reminisce about how Cannes used to be fun. How you would hang out over lunch and wine, unreachable by phone for hours on end. And critics would join them, rather than rushing off to blog an opinion. They would forget the time and talk about film as if nothing else mattered.
Far out.
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