Less Plot, More Story, Mr. Lee

Ang Lee’s “Taking Woodstock� is a coming-of-age film set against the backdrop of the legendary Woodstock music festival in 1969.

   Elliot Teichberg (Demetri Martin) is a young gay man, still closeted. His parents run a decaying motel, rather grandly called the El Monaco, in the southern Catskills.

   Elliot’s the head of the Chamber of Commerce and doing everything he can to try and stimulate the local economy.

   So when nearby Wallkill yanks the permit for the festival, he gets in touch with Mike Lang, the primary Woodstock organizer, and brokers the deal that wound up with the three days of peace etc. at Max Yasgur’s farm.

   Along the way the motel is rescued from oblivion by a sudden infusion of cash and the townspeople have mixed feelings — especially when the hippies start to show up.

   The film suffers from what the great critic Joe Bob Briggs terms “too much plot getting in the way of the story.â€�

   Is it about Elliot, his complicated relationship with his fatalistic, quiet father and his miserly, abrasive mother? His sexuality?

Or is it about wonderful, life-changing Woodstock?

   Hard to say. Interesting plot twists peter out;  Lee and screenwriter James Schamus squander a platoon of interesting characters. Elliot goes to the festival he helped create and has a revelation, of sorts. In any event, he meets up with a hippie couple who have some very good LSD, and the resulting trip scene is the most accurate in cinema history — no spinning cameras and zooming in and out on a paisley bedspread, a la Roger Corman’s “The Trip.â€�  (I looked in vain for Owsley Stanley’s name in the credits.)

Elliot winds up learning a great deal about his parents, himself, and life in general. And that’s fine.

   But there is a lot of material that proves ancillary, at best. Without enough meat in the story, the filmmaker tries to distract the audience with hippie hijinks.

   The psychedelic analogy is perhaps best. Like the details that seem incredibly significant at the time, only to fade away in the aftermath of the drug experience, “Taking Woodstockâ€� is ultimately about the young Jewish kid. Stripped of the setting, the tale could be summed up in a couple of lines.

   You don’t need a pulsating hillside to tell this story.

   Full credit to the wardrobe department for getting the young guy in the Brooks Brothers sack suit right and to the special effects people for avoiding exploitation film tactics in the trip scene.

And a big “blecch� to the scene where the avant-garde theater people take their clothes off, once again proving the old theatrical adage that experimental theater should experiment with remaining clad.

“Taking Woodstock� is rated R for nudity, sexual content, drug use and language. It is playing at The Moviehouse in Millerton, NY, and the Cineroms in Winsted and Torrington in Connecticut.