Paul Schrader’s Adam Resurrected is a true conundrum. A self-indulgent mess that’s virtually unwatchable at times, it also features a genuinely spectacular performance by Jeff Goldblum that demands to be seen. Released late last year in an attempt to generate some awards-season traction, it finally plays in the Cleveland area this weekend.
Based on Yoram Kaniuk’s acclaimed 1968 novel about Holocaust
survivor Adam Stein (Goldblum), Schrader’s movie is set principally in
a concentration camp and a mental institution in the middle of Israel’s
Negev Desert. Schrader and cinematographer Sebastian Edschmid opted to
shoot the camp scenes in black and white and the asylum scenes in
color. Like too much of Adam Resurrected, it’s an obvious
artistic choice that feels both needlessly showy and fatally
literal/pretentious under the circumstances.
The flashbacks to 1930s Berlin in which Adam is a celebrated circus
performer who shamelessly toadies before Nazi brass are the most
compelling parts of the film. It’s during Adam’s days and nights in the
celebrity limelight that he first makes the acquaintance of Commandant
Klein (Willem Dafoe in a performance that veers uncomfortably into
Hogan’s Heroes territory), who’ll ultimately become his savior
and the source of his eternal damnation. After he’s shipped to
Stellring concentration camp, Klein takes Adam under his wing as his
(literal) pet dog.
The memory of that humiliating degradation and the guilt he
experiences for having survived when every member of his family was
gassed eventually leads ex-clown Adam to the asylum. Adam
Resurrected never finds a consistent tone. It jumps
schizophrenically from gallows humor to abject tragedy, sometimes
within the same scene. Kaniuk’s book mixed disparate moods with
finesse, but that type of authorial discipline seems beyond Schrader’s
grasp. And the polyglot cast results in a cacophony of dueling accents.
Goldblum, however, is sensational. Too bad the rest of the movie isn’t
up to his exacting standards.
This article appears in May 13-19, 2009.