Oz magazine was a leading publication of the 1960s countercultural underground press, using satirical humor, psychedelic art, and scathing anti-establishment political articles to critique the status quo of the time, first in Australia and then in London. Its envelope-pushing content and endorsement of the expression of free love in pretty much any form landed its editors in obscenity trials in both countries. After being acquitted upon appeal in the Australia trial (1964), main editor Richard Neville and editor/artist Martin Sharp headed to London in 1966 to recreate the magazine in the center of the countercultural movement. They were joined there by Neville’s girlfriend Louise and other contributors, notably Germaine Greer, who would later become very well-known for her feminist literary critical work The Female Eunuch. By 1970, Oz’s editors again found themselves indicted for obscenity and intent to corrupt minors.

The upcoming film Hippie Hippie Shake, adapted from Neville’s memoir, focuses on London Oz from its inception (Neville and Sharp’s arrival in London) through the obscenity trial. I saw the film at a work-in-progress preview, so it wouldn’t be fair to give a definitive review on it at this point, but I’d like to at least give some impressions of the film as it is now. Most of the issues I had with the film were pacing and narrative issues – I’m interested to see if director Beeban Kidron (Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason) will be able to iron those out before the film is released (it currently has no release date set).

The first half of the film covers the rise of London Oz, as Richard (played by Cillian Murphy) and Martin (Max Minghella) join Louise (Sienna Miller) in London and gather contributors for the magazine, which include David Widgery, an earnest young political activist who wants to write only about things like the horrors of Vietnam, and Germaine Greer, of course focused on feminist issues and sexual equality. Soon they are joined by business whiz Felix Dennis, and rifts begin to form that eventually threaten Oz nearly as much as the obscenity trial that takes up the second half of the film. Felix is quickly typed as one who is interested in the magazine for the amount of sexual material it allows him to work with rather than its serious countercultural aspirations. Other interpersonal conflicts occur when Martin wants to do an all-image issue, and when Louise feels as though Richard cares more about an increasingly ill-defined cause than he does for her.

Unfortunately, none of these conflicts really go anywhere – they just sort of go away when the trial starts. There was a real opportunity here for the trial to reunite the Oz editors behind a renewed sense of their joint purpose, but that gets lost in the series of overly episodic scenes that make up the first half of the film. We’re never shown anything of Oz’s time in Australia (not even a hint of the earlier trial), and we’re given almost no information about Neville’s background, making it difficult to get an idea of who he is and why he’s interested in running a countercultural magazine. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of stories that start in media res, but Hippie Hippie Shake just feels like it left out important background details. The whole first half is fairly disconnected and scenes are thrown together in roughly chronological order, but without a whole lot of narrative logic. To be fair, the second half is much tighter and most of the trial scenes are electric – Neville’s main defense speech is powerful and still relevant today. However, the emotional high I got toward the end isn’t completely deserved. We want to feel like we’re behind these characters and their magazine, but if we are, it’s because of the stirring speeches and rising music, or because we already have a bias toward the countercultural movement and in this case especially, the sexual freedom it represented – not because Hippie Hippie Shake has given us a credible reason to think that Oz was all that. The first half of the film, in its current edit, is too rushed and disconnected to get a handle on what Oz stood for before Felix and Richard and Martin starting pulling it in different directions.

There are several very good scenes – a spontaneous skinny-dipping scene captures the freshness and vitality of the time period, and a plot-central argument between Richard and Louise is very well-written and perfectly enacted by both Murphy and Miller. A brief segment with Richard’s father raised many intriguing questions about Oz’s purpose and whether Richard and his friends were really representing what they wanted to represent (“if you’re all about love, why is everything so aggressive?”) – questions that come up again with at least tentative answers during the trial. A section set at the 1970 Isle of Wight music festival does a great job of evoking the feel of the time (and includes a gorgeous fly-through long take moving from the deserted landscape into the backstage area and finally onto the stage, revealing a sea of concert-goers), though the rest of the film seems surprisingly non-time period specific. The person introducing the film indicated that the music wasn’t completely finished yet – a few more distinctively late ’60s tracks would go a long way toward making the film feel grounded. The trial, as I’ve said, is pretty tight, with good dialogue both humorous and serious. Yet as a whole, the film isn’t fully satisfying on a narrative level due to the somewhat chaotic first half, and it also feels strangely flat much of the time – again, something that post-processing on video and audio may help. I couldn’t help comparing it to Across the Universe in my head, and while Across the Universe certainly had its fair share of flaws, it had a vigor and experimental nature that Hippie Hippie Shake could’ve done well to emulate. Oz was a cutting-edge, experimental magazine. Hippie Hippie Shake is a bit too staid by comparison.

All the actors carry their parts well, though Cillian Murphy would’ve benefited if the writers had given him a stronger characterization to work with as Richard; I especially liked Max Minghella as Martin (but I also liked Martin as a character the best, so I may be biased there) and Sienna Miller fits in well as flower-child Louise. Lee Ingleby impressed me with his comic timing and delivery as Jim Anderson, one of the more endearing members of the editing team. If they recut the beginning of the film to be more cohesive and less rushed, a lot of my major issues would disappear, because the second half really is quite good, and more alive than the first half. So keep in mind that these concerns are based on a work-in-progress print, and since there’s no release date in sight yet, they may well improve it into quite a decent ’60s biopic.

The real Felix Dennis, Richard Neville, and Jim Anderson, in 1970