Woodstock is as long ago to us as the Stock Market Crash was to Woodstock—and Taking Woodstock makes 1969 feel like the ancient past. But maybe that’s because, somehow, it manages to make the peace-love-and-rock’n’roll orgasm of the century boring. One character says of the concert’s promoter, Michael Lang (Jonathan Groff)—a becalmed flower-child smoothie with a cherubic grin—that he’s “real,” as long as the money people backing him are real. And that’s about as real as Taking Woodstock. The movie pats hippies on their furry heads for being polite, but then says, in effect, “Party’s over. Cut your hair and get a job.” The scriptwriter (James Schamus) and director (Ang Lee) of the leaden-souled Brokeback Mountain have reunited to put us on the side of a dry character (the real-life dude who brought the concert to his Upstate New York farming town, and wrote a book about it) with his own generic, apolitical hangups, and threw in the carnivalesque as a slideshow—a memory book for the film’s wistful, middle-aged audience. The filmmakers seem completely uninterested in how it feels to be young and free, though they flirt with current attitudes by giving the picture a pro-gay slant, and casting Demetri Martin, Emile Hirsch, and Paul Dano with hipster credibility in mind. But it’s to no avail; like the more “artistic” Across the Universe, this ain’t about the forever young—it’s about milking the sentimental old. Shamelessly, the film goes straight for the udders.

Michael says, at the end, that the concert producers have given what they promised: three days of music, love and peace. Now that it’s over, they’ll sue each other for every last dime that dropped in the muck. Even worse, he invites the hero out West, where Michael’s planning another profitable peace binge: Altamont. Real funny. Are the filmmakers so very cynical that this is all they think the ’60s were about? “The Man” fleeced the hippies when they were young, and now He’s at it again. For the aging counterculture, struggling against the nostalgia-peddlers’ muck, freedom’s just another word for nothing left to gain.