Word: lee
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...This is one of those little movies set against a big event, like I Wanna Hold Your Hand (how four girls got into Ed Sullivan's theater to see the Beatles) or Love Field (Diane Lane as a JFK fan in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963). Lee's film is screenwriter-producer James Schamus' adaptation of Elliot Tiber's reminiscence about his small but crucial role in bringing the mammoth concert to his hometown...
...Lee, who was born and raised in Taiwan and didn't head to the States until the late '70s, has often shown an outsider's acuity in portraying the subtleties and sadness of American folkways. His The Ice Storm, set in 1973, and Brokeback Mountain, which spans three decades beginning in the '60s, couldn't be more simpatico with the quiet desperation of ordinary folks. In this ostensible comedy, though, his ear is tin, his eye myopic. The right-wing townsfolk, artsy theater people and visiting hippies come across as the shallowest stereotypes. Lee's attempts to imitate the split...
...business end of the Woodstock enterprise holds some interest, but the family dynamic is sitcom-broad and contains a near libelous caricature of immigrant Jews. Maybe Elliot's mother really was a screaming, tightfisted tyrant, and his father the standard henpecked husband. And maybe Lee couldn't find American actors who'd fit his view of these cartoon creatures. But to outfit Staunton in a housedress that is gargantuanly padded in the bosom and butt is to force an exceptional actress into unintended parody, and to reduce the Holocaust-survivors generation to Borscht Belt jokes. Staunton has made a long...
...rest of the movie is a mess - Lee's first total miscalculation, his first wholly inessential film. He'll do better; he almost has to. The rest of us with any interest in a 40-year-old rock concert can get the DVD of Woodstock, and maybe sing along to a new version of Joni Mitchell's tune...
...going on down to Wadleigh's film I'm going to have a cinematic blast Where the music lives tho it's from the past And the film ain't by Ang Lee...