So the drugs are cute. The mudslides are cute. The naked boys and girls are cute. Even the kid who’s just come home from Vietnam woozy with chemically enhanced post-traumatic stress (Emile Hirsch) has cheeks that are dying for a pinch. When we finally see the concert it’s from a mile away and it undulates like a Day-Glo volcano. This is as safe and sweet a movie as you could make about America’s sex-drugs-and-rock ’n’ roll-est event.
Lee and his longtime screenwriter and producer, James Schamus, aren’t interested in the concert so much as the impressions the era left. Their distanced approach has its backhanded merits. For one thing, it feels subversive. Instead of pious commemoration or epic worship we get an episode of “That (Almost) ’70s Show.’’
The movie focuses on how young Elliot Teichberg (Demetri Martin) haphazardly managed to bring a homeless music festival to his Catskills hamlet and how the arrival of thousands of hippies saved the shoddy motel run by his parents, stodgy Holocaust survivors from Russia played by Imelda Staunton and Henry Goodman, two Brits. Elliot has been living in Manhattan, and this is to be the summer he emancipates himself from the expectation that he’ll run the motel. He wants to move to San Francisco and live as the gay man his parents don’t officially know he is.
The story is based on a memoir the son wrote under the name Elliot Tiber. (Someone made the unfortunate choice to keep the book’s punning title.) Schamus distills to a casual phone call the material on Tiber’s involvement in the Stonewall riots the previous month. Instead, he lays out the Teichbergs’ financial stress (the bank is ready to foreclose on the motel), the drolly staged town council meetings, and the negotiations among a bunch of hippies, their lawyers, and a progressive farmer named Max Yasgur (Eugene Levy), who provided the land for the concert.
