Ang Lee, evidently still banking on the critical goodwill since Brokeback Mountain, whips up some innocuous nostalgia around the milestone music festival of the summer of 1969, a fortieth-anniversary fictionalized addendum to Michael Wadleigh’s official Woodstock, complete with imitative split-screen effects. This docucomedy, so to call it, never gets near the music — no nearer than the emblematic mud slide — so that the movie lacks a proper payoff, unless you can count the paint-by-computer acid trip or (cashing in a Brokeback dividend) the homosexual coming-out. It lacks, to put a finer point on it, a sense of purpose, a raison d’être. A few feigned tensions arise along the way — Mafia buttinskies, inhospitable townsfolk, congested traffic — but nothing to derail the prevailing love-in. We get our fill, never fear, of “far out” and “cool” and “groovy” and “heavy,” and we get a handful of hindsight drolleries: “Can you believe it? A dollar for water!” Imelda Staunton, a bulldog in two-toned glasses frames, claims the limelight from both the protagonist (her on-screen son) and a supporting cast of half a million, in the part of a Russian Jewish immigrant who, as proprietress of the mom-and-pop El Monaco Motel, pinches pennies on a pathological scale (one dollar per towel), an irresistible candidate for a hash brownie. A yardstick, that brownie, of the filmmaker’s docile conventionality. With Demetri Martin, Henry Goodman, Liev Schreiber, Jonathan Groff, Eugene Levy, Emile Hirsch. (2009) — Duncan Shepherd
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