Seeing the human circus from Elliot's blinkered perspective provides the absurdist pleasure of watching a historic event through the wrong end of the telescope, as though peering at Hamlet through Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's peephole in Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
Martin, the comedian with his own show on Comedy Central, plays Elliot with the numb-faced, raw-nerved attitude that Dustin Hoffman patented in The Graduate. Like that movie's Benjamin Braddock and the generation that Woodstock defined, Elliot Teichberg was in the process of finding himself as an American man, a man very different from his Russian immigrant parents. And like Lee movies from The Wedding Banquet through Sense and Sensibility and Brokeback Mountain, this one is about a younger generation breaking away from its elders.
The elder Teichbergs, the needling Sonia (Imelda Staunton) and needled Jake (Henry Goodman), are rustics facing foreclosure on the El Monaco, their dilapidated motel with delusions of glamour, which is slipping slowly into the swamp. Elliot, who lives in Manhattan but continues to manage his parents' business affairs, is a would-be entrepreneur and accidental provocateur.
Head of the Bethel chamber of commerce, Elliot holds a permit for the annual arts festival. With dreams of paying off the mortgage, he contacts the Woodstock promoters, denied a permit for their "Aquarian Festival," offering them the El Monaco property and his permit.
