About the music and hippie culture, Woodstock Festival has become a historical legend, but in Taking Woodstock, the festival is a popular flash partly resulted from commercial promotion and negotiation, a business about money.

Historically what comes out is a cultural legend, but in reality some business men holds the festival for making big sum of money.

In 1969, a young man named Elliot trying to help his parents promote their family dilapidated motel. When he hears a neighboring town has pulled the permit on a hippie music festival, he calls the producers, thinking he could drum up some much needed business for the motel by having the music festival held in his hometown.

Three weeks later, half a million people are on their way to his neighbor’s farm and Elliot finds himself swept in a generation-defining experience that would change his life and popular culture.

The screenplay of Taking Woodstock is based on Elliot Tiber memoir Taking Woodstock: A True Story of a Riot, a Concert and a Life, and the film is not far from the original text. People who expect to see the representation of Woodstock Festival may be disappointed at Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock.

In the film, the famous performers like Joan Baez, Janis Joplin, The Who, Jefferson Airplan, or Jimi Hendrix are all unseen. The only live music scene is a surreal view watching from distant hill. The movie gets more than just the clichés of 1960s and Woodstock Festival: huge crows, hippies taking drugs, rain making mud, and the festival music. He never makes it to the actual concert, only goes through several journeys to come to a new self-understanding.

As a free-rider on a police officer’s motorcycle, Eliot leads audiences to see not only what hippies look like but also the variegated and sometimes grotesque pictures of people in the 1960s.

Among them there is a man with a signboard written “Bob Dylan Show me where you are.” No doubt Bob Dylan is the cultural symbol of that time.

Eliot meets a couple, Paul Dano and Kelli Garner, and they introduce him hallucinogen, by which, they claim, one can get high 100 times than sex. In this scene Ang Lee visualizes what one sees when doting—a twisted, blurred vision of extreme happiness.

After his personal doted hallucination, next morning Eliot comes home and has argument against his mother. After his parents’ psychedelic dancing in the rain, his mother is found sleeping beside a large sum of cash, which can be used to pay family debt.

The reconciliation comes when his father simple, straight answer to Eliot’s question about enduring his mother: “I love her.”