The last time Ang Lee made a movie, it ended with three words — "Jack, I swear" — that reduced millions to streaming tears of recognition and understanding. It also won an Oscar.

This time, he uses only two words, and throws them at you in the middle of the picture. But the emotional wallop is the same. And the honor should be, too.

For just as Lee and longtime collaborator James Schamus used the vastness of mountains and skies and two gay cowboys to show us the most private truth of all — that love is love, period, and sometimes it really is forever — so do they use the vastness of Woodstock to reveal some of the biggest transformations that occurred far from the stage, between father and son, husband and wife, friend and friend.

TAKING WOODSTOCK

Rating: 3 stars (Out of four)

Directed by Ang Lee. Demetri Martin, Emile Hirsch, Eugene Levy, Liev Schreiber, Henry Goodman and Imelda Staunton star in the film adaptation of the book "Taking Woodstock: A True Story of a Riot, a Concert, and a Life," by Elliot Tiber with Tom Monte.

Rated R, opening Friday at area theaters.

Elliot Tiber (Demetri Martin) had no way of knowing any of this at the start of the summer of 1969. And neither do we, as the film opens and hovers like a dragonfly over the hot stillness of July in the Catskills — over its motionless fields and woods and dusty roads, and over the almost comically shabby El Monaco Motel at the intersection of Route 17B and Route 55 near the southwest shore of White Lake.

Bought by Tiber's Russian-Jewish immigrant parents with hopes of turning it into another Grossinger's, the motel has, instead, over the years simply turned gross.

Elliot comes up from New York City on weekends, trying to help keep it alive, or at least passing health codes, but it's clearly a failing proposition. Failing so spectacularly that within minutes we see Elliott and his parents visiting the local bank to plead for a loan. Well, Elliot pleads. His father, the weather-beaten and philosophically resigned Jake Teichberg (Henry Goodman) sits looking mournful, while his belligerent wife Sonia (the utterly priceless Imelda Staunton) batters the hapless bank official with tales of Nazis, pogroms, Cossacks and walking 1,000 miles through 24-foot-deep Siberian snows. Unsurprisingly, the loan doesn't materialize.

And so they press on, as they always have.

In desperation, Elliott convenes the Bethel Chamber of Commerce — of which he is president at age 34 — and asks the seven or eight people assembled for ideas, only to immediately regret it when one woman suggests a running-of-the-bulls type of event using local cows.

"I think it would be fun to see those people who visit us, you know, those men with the tall black hats and curls, running from our local livestock," she offers enthusiastically.

Only after he learns that Walkill in Orange County has just pulled the plug on the planned Woodstock Festival, do the wheels start to spin. For Tiber has a $10 permit to hold his own local music fest — a chamber music fest — and he knows Woodstock organizer Michael Lang from their Bensonhurst neighborhood in Brooklyn.

Lang visits, declares Elliot's proposed site a useless swamp and gets taken to meet the Teichberg's neighbor Max Yasgur (the ever-delightful Eugene Levy), who offers his 600-acre farm's sprawling alfalfa field for a nominal fee, "as long as you clean up after yourselves."

That winds up being no small task, thanks to a few ill-timed tokes on a joint before Elliot's news conference, after which the word mistakenly goes forth: The concert is free, man, free! And a half-million people begin heading for Yasgur's farm.

Meanwhile, Elliot is trying to keep track of his longtime friend, Billy, a Vietnam vet (Emile Hirsch) who is beset by flashbacks and paranoia, muttering about "fragging the sergeant," and lurching in and out of a stupor induced by drugs from the VA. They are aided by a third friend, a cross-dressing ex-Marine named Vilma (Liev Schreiber, a vision in sleeveless lavender, blond wig and pistol strapped to his thigh), who, of course, is on his way to visit his parents in Buffalo, but wants to stick around for the happening.

As the festival swells, Lee and Schamus capture its enormity best by showing the smaller, more private — and somehow more monumental — transformations that come about in ways we can't possibly anticipate.

As scads of naked hippies gleefully splash in the nearby lake, Elliot wanders up to find his staid father gazing at them in wonderment, and then turning his gaze to his son, clearly grasping that what's being celebrated most isn't the free music but rather the freedom to simply be — free to be all shapes, all sizes and, most importantly, all types of love.

Including whatever kind his son may find. "It's starting," Jake says softly to his son. "Go be part of it." It's clear he is not just talking about the concert.

These moments of acceptance and surrender comprise the heart and soul of the film, perhaps in much the same way they comprised the heart and soul of Woodstock Nation — giving oneself over to love in whatever form it arrives, and to beauty in the here and now, if only because one is, simply, right here, right now.

As Elliot proceeds to discover who he wants to be, Billy comes upon Woodstock's famous, rain-slicked muddy hill and begins to remember who he had been.

"I remember this hill," he says, regaling Elliot with a tale about a prom night, some booze, and a girl. Wait, says Elliot, recalling the same night. "That was you?"

If an Oscar could be awarded for what an actor does with just two words, one should go to Emile Hirsch for what he does next: With his eyes still fixed on the hill and his smile slowly fading, Billy replies in a torn voice that leaves no doubt he's suddenly grasped the magnitude of his loss: "It was." He says nothing more, nor does his expression change. But for a few seconds, it flickers with grief so profound that it conveys an image of war no news footage has ever captured.

Until now, what has remained after 40 years is the Woodstock legacy: every song heard over and over, every interview seen over and over, every story repeated over and over.

Except for one — what happened in the beginning — and in the hands of Ang Lee and James Schamus, it's maybe the best story of all. Because for once, it's not about the 500,000 people who went to Woodstock, lost themselves in the music and then left, having found freedom.

It's about the one person who was there all along, made the music possible, and then left, having found himself.

As generational events go, do they get any bigger?

Buffalo native Lauri Githens Hatch has been a radio and newspaper journalist for more than 25 years