Dropping Out [2 film reviews]

Dropping Out

"Taking Woodstock" and "The Baader Meinhof Complex."

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2009/08/31/090831crci_cinema_lane

by Anthony Lane
August 31, 2009

The new Ang Lee film, "Taking Woodstock," is not about the music
festival of forty years ago. Nobody plays Hendrix, as if anyone
could. Nobody mimes to the Grateful Dead, a decision that merits our
undying gratitude. There is no Janis Joplin, although surviving
footage suggests that, even when Janis was there, she wasn't really
there. True, we get snatches of music borne on the wind, plus distant
views of the throng around the stage; but most of the movie busies
itself with the lead-up to the main event. This is no bad thing: the
sidelong glance is often our best approach to historical happenings,
and, in this case, we already have a report from center
stage­"Woodstock," the 1970 documentary directed by Michael Wadleigh
and heroically edited by, among others, the young Martin Scorsese.

Our guide is Elliot Teichberg (Demetri Martin), whose parents, the
oppressed Jake (Henry Goodman) and the oppressive Sonia (Imelda
Staunton), run the El Monaco, in White Lake, deep in the Borscht
Belt. It's a motel that has seen better days, although even the
better days, you suspect, were not that good. It has a swimming pool
that Jake spikes with bleach instead of chlorine, and a sign saying
"Play at Own Risk." (Indeed, the plethora of signs around the
property gives it an air of inadvertent neo-Pop­a hint that it may be
flexing itself for fresh culture.) Elliot shores up the business,
acting as president of the local Chamber of Commerce, and running
what he calls an arts festival­in reality, a few jazz records played
over loudspeakers and a theatre troupe from Vassar living in the
barn. He has the permit to prove it.

And there's your plot. Armed with his rubber-stamped scrap of paper,
Elliot is well placed to jump in when a nearby town turns down the
Woodstock organizers. They are led by the Bolan-haired Michael Lang,
whose chosen modes of transport run as follows: helicopter,
limousine, motorcycle, horse. Lang is played by Jonathan Groff,
who­in his big-screen début­radiates such relaxing sweetness that
everyone in his zone is goaded into action without complaint. Such
ease is typical of Lee's movie, which, rather too easily, sells us
the notion that Woodstock represented a rare alignment of the
American stars, as a bright shining counterculture was, for a perfect
moment, conjoined with the capitalist ethic. Max Yasgur (Eugene
Levy), the farmer who rents out his land, says he's heard more
"please"s and "thank you"s in a few days with the entrepreneurial
hippies than he has in a lifetime of White Lake.

Ang Lee is normally such an expert calibrator of performances­there
wasn't a weak link in "Brokeback Mountain"­that it's a shock to find
both overwhelmers and underwhelmers at loose in his latest work. The
hero is a cover version of the Patrick Fugit figure from "Almost
Famous," and, as before, the whole virgin-among-the-rockers conceit
feels too pale and pliable for a central presence. Aside from Groff,
the only one who gets the whelming right is Liev Schreiber: something
of a surprise, given that he spends the movie in a blond wig and a
thin cotton dress. He plays a transvestite Korean War vet named
Vilma, who offers Elliot his services as a security enforcer. It's a
nice gesture, and one that Lee and his regular screenwriter, James
Schamus, devised for the film, so why leave it hanging? After Elliot
is menaced by protection racketeers, Vilma swears to see them off if
they return, but they never do­another loose end, in a tale that
grows ever more frayed. There is a lovely first flirtation between
Elliot and one of the builders, as we realize (maybe as he realizes)
that he could be gay; but, apart from a barroom kiss and then, out of
nowhere, the sight of the builder sleeping beside him, the issue is
ignored. And what about the angry townsfolk? Just because the
festival dissolved all fears, does it mean that every drama, too,
must go unresolved?

You could argue that "Taking Woodstock" is within its rights to join
the general mellow, but, like a client at the El Monaco, it plays at
its own risk. There is a sequence in a camper van where Elliot drops
acid, distilled here into color-dripping C.G.I. kaleidoscopy: as
tedious as every other trip committed to film. (The special effects
transform the Woodstock crowd into a heaving human sea. Very
impressive, but it doesn't look like bliss. It looks like Gustave
Doré's vision of Hell.) Lee is a precisian, not a prober, and you can
feel the film floundering as it seeks its proper focus; now and then,
as he did in "Hulk," he splits the screen, like the Teichbergs
dividing motel rooms into three to triple their income, but he lacks
the will to nose around, to pull in and out of passing scenes, that
Robert Altman brought to "Nashville." Even in the fine travelling
shot with which we follow Elliot toward Mr. Yasgur's meadow through a
flock of fans, the procession feels not so much stumbled upon as
neatly staged, one cute detail on the heels of another: a watermelon
stall, a bleating sheep, a trio of nuns giving the V sign of peace.
You can't deny the smiling mood that wafts through the film like
incense, and to that extent it honors the original three days; but
not once does a character's show of feeling stir you, send you, or
stop you in your tracks, and the loss is unsustainable. Maybe we
needed Hendrix after all.

The Red Army Faction, with its logo of a gun set against a red star,
was a left-wing terrorist group founded in Germany in 1970 and
referred to by the public­though not by the members themselves­as the
Baader Meinhof Gang. The tag was invented by the media, which dwelt
on two of the ringleaders, a hothead named Andreas Baader and a
former journalist named Ulrike Meinhof, and the label is used again
for "The Baader Meinhof Complex"­a title nicely poised between
criminal cluster and psychological obsession.

The film, directed by Udi Edel and based on the book of the same name
by Stefan Aust, takes us scrupulously through the heydays of the
group, each deed more brazen and brutal than the last: the bombing of
a newspaper office, the daylight murders of prominent German
citizens, the siege of an embassy in Stockholm, the hijacking of a
Lufthansa jet, and so forth. This stream of information may be more
than many viewers will care to process, as the director's moral
mission to lay out the full saga clashes awkwardly with the aesthetic
imperative to keep it tight; a curt, scary scene of an R.A.F. woman
named Petra (Alexandra Maria Lara) being waved down and pursued at a
checkpoint would be scarier still if we had any vivifying sense of
who Petra was. Even Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu), locked in prison from
1972 until his suicide, in 1977, claims not to know the next
generation of fighters who are out there, ramping up the rage.

I have seen "The Baader Meinhof Complex" three or four times now,
and, despite exasperation with its fissile form, I find it impossible
not to be plunged afresh into this engulfing age of European anxiety.
How casual, by comparison, seem the peaceable dreams of "Taking
Woodstock" (and thank God for that, you might say). The Americans who
frolic naked with their children at White Lake are shedding their
inhibitions as lightly as shirts, whereas, when the Meinhof family
does the same in the opening minutes of Edel's film, you feel a
shiver of the sinister­a Rousseauist imagining of a society that asks
to be denuded and scrubbed clean, at whatever cost. And though it is
touching to see Elliot's father confess, as Woodstock winds down,
that it has rejuvenated his old bones, just watch the parents of
Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek)­at once the most appealing and the
most unbending of the R.A.F.'s inner circle­respond to her trial for
arson. It's the burning, unexpected heart of the film. Her mother,
eyes aglow, says, "I myself feel liberated," while her father, a
pastor, talks of Gudrun's "holy self-realization." Only Germans still
speak fluent Hegelian, and the springing of political extremism from
spiritual roots is something to ponder; is that why Edel frames the
jailed, close-cropped Meinhof (Martina Gedeck)­whose own father
allied himself with anti-Nazi Protestant dissent­against a blank
wall, deliberately echoing the silent heroine of "The Passion of Joan
of Arc" (1928)?

Needless to say, there was nothing holy about the terrors meted out
by the R.A.F., yet they were not mere purveyors of radical chic. The
precise point at which Meinhof crosses over from reporting on the
R.A.F. to joining the cause­should she follow Baader, in his flight
from custody, through an open window, or stay behind as a respected
bourgeois mother of two?­is confirmed here as a genuinely momentous
fork in the soul's road. Even when she inveighs against the Shah of
Iran's visit to Germany, or the war in Vietnam, you know that her
homeland is the true provocation of her pain, as if the democratic
miracle of its rebirth, in the previous twenty-five years, had been
unearned­achieved with too much aplomb and too little guilt. And,
once you learn that Hanns Martin Schleyer (Bernd Stegemann), whom the
R.A.F. kidnaps and executes in the final act of the story, was not
only the president of the Employers' Association but, in a former
life, an Untersturmführer in the S.S., the warning issued by this
movie rings clear: the pressure of history can be hard to bear.

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