Synthetic Sixties
If you can remember the 1960s, the saying goes, you weren't really there. Then again, perhaps you've just seen too many movies. Even those of us not cognisant, or even alive, during that decade will experience degrees of déjà vu while watching An Education and Taking Woodstock, two new films set at opposite ends of the 1960s.
Both are adapted from first-person accounts of societies on the brink of change, but they couldn't be more different in tone. An Education concerns the 16-year-old, Oxford-bound sixth-former Jenny (Carey Mulligan), who in 1961 falls for David (Peter Sarsgaard), an older man with doughy good looks and an irresistible line in droll patter.
Adapted by Nick Hornby from a short memoir by Lynn Barber, the film uses this teenager's awakening as a metaphor for the imminent cultural explosion. But it rather overplays that idea: you come away with the impression that Jenny single-handedly created the 1960s by sleeping with an older man, hating suburbia and dreaming of being French. When she rails at her teachers, denouncing Britain as bored and colourless, her monologues have an incongruous Churchillian gusto; like everything else here, they sound written and rehearsed - not thought or spoken - and heavy with hindsight.
While the camera swoons over Jenny, and Hornby's script places unchallenged compliments about her on every character's lips, she comes across as an insufferable wretch to the audience, despite Mulligan's button-bright performance. Jenny's development and disillusionment aren't nearly as affecting as that of her calcified parents, Jack (Alfred Molina) and Marjorie (Cara Seymour), who are dying slowly of self-loathing in Twickenham. Well, there's not much else to do there of an evening.
David's arrival jazzes up their lives, too, and the most moving love story here is surely between him and Jack. The father is so taken by his potential son-in-law that he can be manipulated into betraying his own principles. Jack objects to the idea of David whisking his daughter off on what promises to be a grubby weekend, but by the end of the conversation he is asking meekly: "Are you sure it's no bother, David?"
The Danish director Lone Scherfig has a light touch with her actors, but the film suffers from a complete absence of present tense: it's shot
in NostalgiaVision. London resembles a giant movie set, the camera soaring so high over the art-designed period streets that it's a wonder the audience doesn't complain of nosebleeds. David slips his own little lies past Jenny and her family, but the movie is cut from the same cloth. It's selling a synthetic spin on the 1960s, and I'm not buying.
Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock takes the opposite tack in its assessment of the music festival that changed the world - yes, even more than when Deep Purple played Knebworth in 1985, or the night it was 2-for-1 on falafel at Latitude. Based on the book by Elliot Tiber, who found the site for Woodstock when the festival's original location fell through at the eleventh hour, the picture is at its strongest when steering clear of the shindig itself. Elliot (Demetri Martin) is young, gifted, Jewish and gay; he returns from Greenwich Village to his parents' ailing, fleabag motel in the Catskills to play the dutiful son, and his part in bringing Woodstock to a nearby dairy farm provides the income to save the motel. Money, rather than hallucinogenics, was the grease for the wheels of this revolution. And it is cash, not drugs, that we see being passed discreetly between hazy-eyed strangers.
Indeed, there is scarcely any drug-taking here, and it can't be a coincidence that the scenes involving narcotics (including a tedious acid trip) are the laziest. It's as if the film wilts under the glare of Woodstock cliché. But so long as Lee lays off the split-screen wackiness and sticks to the bureaucratic details, or the petty domestic tensions between Elliot and his mother, Sonia (Imelda Staunton), the film resembles a crash course in how to "do" history without belabouring its significance. Sonia is particularly useful at thwarting any dopey mythologising. Patrolling the motel grounds with a sharp stick, she jabs at the trembling undergrowth, scattering naked hedonists with her war cry: "No shtupping in the bushes!"
The most endearing aspect of Taking Woodstock is that it isn't trying to flog you anything. It has a lightweight, take-it-or-leave-it quality that is infinitely preferable to the slick salesmanship of An Education. Still, it might be argued that Lee's film could have done better in its choice of protagonist. Elliot is sweet enough, but does he have the complexity to sustain an entire movie? There is surely a more robust hero-in-waiting in the shape of Vilma - just your average transvestite ex-marine, sashaying around the campsite packing heat in his garter belt. The formerly earnest Liev Schreiber adopts a mischievous twinkle to go with his blonde tresses and kimono. You can only hope he gets his own spin-off film. I'll certainly be first in the queue if anyone ever makes Taking Woodstock 2: Vilma Hits Altamont.
“An Education" opens on 30 October. "Taking Woodstock" opens on 13 November
