Review: Adam Resurrected (2008)

[Mark R. Leeper]

                         ADAM RESURRECTED
                (a film review by Mark R. Leeper)

     CAPSULE: This is a bizarre surreal fantasy involving
     a man with psychic powers, a German Holocaust death
     camp, and people who are degraded to live and act
     like dogs.  How does all that fit together?  I vote
     for "not very well."  Jeff Goldblum's performance is
     magnetic, but he has problems with the accent.  Paul
     Schrader directs Noah Stollman's adaptation of Yoram
     Kaniuk's novel.  Rating: low +1 (-4 to +4) or 4/10

ADAM RESURRECTED is a macabre fantasy that verges into surrealism
and uses the Holocaust without being enlightening about what the
experience was really like. It seems almost redundant to claim how
unpleasant a particular film about the Holocaust is.  But ADAM
RESURRECTED seems to be unpleasant for no good purpose.  The film
is not enlightening about history, nor does it give us much insight
into the unlikely title character.  Here the Holocaust is just a
literary device to explain how Adam had been degraded at one time
in his life and to show the man that the experience made of him.
And since he seems to have at times magical powers like telepathy
or to bleed from chosen parts of his body voluntarily he is just to
alien to give much of a feeling of realism.  In a sense the film
just takes the Holocaust in vain.

We see the story in a series of flashbacks.  The dapper Adam Stein
(Jeff Goldblum) is taken in handcuffs to a sort of Israeli mental
asylum for Holocaust survivors.  He seems out of place as being
perfectly normal.  But as soon as he arrives he goes right to a
bottle of liquor that the attendants had hidden.  There is no
explanation as to how he knew it was there.  We find out he has had
a history of faking ailments here in ways that fooled even x-ray
machines.  In flashbacks we see that in the late 1920s and early
1930s Adam Stein was the toast of Berlin.  As a circus and stage
entertainer he could perform mystical feats that really defy
explanation.  In one incident becomes a test of wills with an
audience member named Klein (Willem Dafoe).  Goldblum wins that
test, but loses in the long run.  When the Nazis round up Jews,
Stein ends up in a death camp ruled by now-Commandant Klein.  Klein
recognizes Stein and rather than killing him straight out, he makes
Stein a house pet.  Stein will live as long as he walks on all
fours and imitates a dog.  These memories come back to Stein--if
they ever left--because at the asylum in Stein's present day the
staff keep a boy who was raised as a dog.

Jeff Goldblum's performance is mesmerizing in almost all regards.
In only one aspect is it bad and that is his inability to maintain
a German accent.  One sentence will have a thick accent and the
next will sound downright American.  He does appear to be doing
Stein's stage magic for real and without camera tricks.  Derek
Jacobi plays the doctor who is given Stein's case at the asylum.
But he is as ineffectual in the role as his character is in the
story.  Willem Dafoe plays the Commandant with a dash too little
command.  It may be just that Goldblum steals the attention playing
another character with an excess of personality.

The film is based on Yoram Kaniuk's novel.  In a novel the author
has time to lull the reader into a mood to accept what is going on.
In a film it may not work as well.  Director Paul Schrader has made
his share of hypnotic films, notably CAT PEOPLE, but the task of
getting the audience to accept all this may have been beyond his
powers.

This is a really off-the-wall nihilistic fantasy that may please a
small segment of the audience and perhaps even become a cult film.
But I suspect it will not even be marketed to the general run of
filmgoer.  I rate ADAM RESURRECTED a low +1 on the -4 to +4 scale
or 4/10.

Film Credits: <http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0479341/>


					Mark R. Leeper
					mleeper at optonline.net
					Copyright 2008 Mark R. Leeper