ADAM RESURRECTED
Directed by Paul Schrader
Produced by Ehud Blieberg & Werner Wirsing
Written by Noah Stollman, based on the novel by Yoram Kaniuk
Released by Bleiberg Entertainment
Germany/USA/Israel. 106 Min. Rated R
With Jeff Goldblum, Willem Dafoe, Derek Jacobi, Tudor Rapiteanu & Ayelet Zurer
 

In a season when a new movie with Nazis and/or the Holocaust arrives every week (The Reader, Defiance, Valkyrie), Adam Resurrected is the one under the radar among the pack, and sadly, rightfully so. Without very much cohesion, it dances between two plots.

Adam Stein is a very successful and popular comic in 1930s Berlin until he’s booted off by the Nazis for being Jewish. Later in 1961, he is the ringmaster/healer at an asylum for post-Holocaust trauma victims. After a relapse, Adam is brought back to the mental institution, where he is something of a celebrity. He reads minds and plays tricks on the staff and patients, until his horrific memories from his time in a concentration camp return. In the black-and-white flashbacks, he’s saved only by acting perpetually like a dog for Commandant Klein (Willem Dafoe) because Adam thinks, by cooperating, he’ll get to see his family again.           

Jeff Goldblum turns in some really fascinating work here as he always does when given the opportunity. He can be so invested in Adam that we feel for him for most of the way through the picture (that is until the ending, which I’ll get to in a moment). He is equaled by Willem Dafoe as the Commandant, who we first see in the ’20s as a bewildered member of Adam’s audience, and then years later as the vicious Nazi brute who makes Adam into his groveling pet. 

Unlike his earlier productions like Blue Collar and Mishima, Paul Schrader can’t seem to match up the emotional intensity in the institutional scenes as he can with the death camp scenes. We see very awkward, strange set-ups where Adam leads his fellow patients in a crazy play reading or comforts a traumatized survivor who can’t bear to tell his story. And then there’s a young patient, a boy who only communicates and behaves like a dog, chained on all fours in his room, whose appearance takes the story in a direction I would’ve liked had Schrader focused more on that. Instead, he cuts around between Adam and the dog/boy, a strange sexual fling with Adam and the head nurse (played blandly by Ayelet Zurer), and his nightmarish past. It all ends with a very wild and unpredictable scene where Adam faces his Nazi demon at night in the desert. This is by far one of the weakest endings I have seen all year, and it would be laughable if not for the early promise of a premise based around Holocaust survivors in a psychiatric clinic and its “star” patient dealing with his experiences through a younger surrogate. Jack Gattanella
December 12, 2008