This movie snuck up on me. It started so slowly and
so matter-of-factly -- an ordinary story about an
ordinary family doing ordinary things like trying to
keep the bank from foreclosing on their property --
that it wasn't until halfway through the film that
I realized I was in the hands of a master filmmaker.
We are, after all, talking Ang Lee, director of
"Sense And Sensibility," "The Ice Storm," "Crouching
Tiger Hidden Dragon," "Brokeback Mountain" and "Lust,
Caution," each a character-driven masterpiece in its
own way. But he lured me in thinking of this tale
about a young Jewish kid trying to save his parents'
motel in the Catskills as "ordinary" and not worth
paying full attention to, as if *it* were a character-
driven masterpiece itself. My bad.
It was the introduction of the music at the halfway
mark of the film that "flipped" things for me. That
and the entrance of one of the best characters I've
ever seen onscreen. Vilma, the cross-dressing ex-
marine who heads up Jake's security detail, is played
to perfection by macho actor Liev Schreiber ("Defiance,"
"X-Men Origins: Wolverine"), who also happens to be a
the extremely talented director of one of the other
best character-driven movies I've seen in years,
"Everything Is Illuminated."
Schreiber's near-perfect "read" of the character of
Vilma, followed shortly by the first actual rock 'n
roll we'd heard in a film about one of the most signif-
icant events in rock 'n roll history, made me sit up
and take notice, and remember that this is an Ang Lee
film.
I found it utterly charming, but also reminiscent of
the times. I never made it to Woodstock, but I was
peripherally involved in setting up its predecessor,
the Monterey Pop Festival. What Ang Lee captures so
perfectly in this film is what I experienced then --
an overriding sense of the magic that Carlos Castaneda
called "controlled folly."
Monterey should never have worked. We were a bunch of
stoned hippies trying to put on a really big event
and make it work. Woodstock should never have worked,
for the same reason. But they both did. I think it
was something about the innocence of the times that
*allowed* it to happen. You could get away with shit
back then that you can't get away with now, just by
being enthusiastic enough.
Maybe you still can. This film certainly reminded me
that it's possible.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlLD_7k68BM
