MVD Marquee Collection: Adam Resurrected (2008) - Reviewed

on
Courtesy of MVD Visual

Ever since Jerry Lewis’ 1972 film The Day the Clown Cried, an infamously incomplete and indefinitely shelved historical dramedy picture about a circus clown who winds up in a concentration camp, the film has spawned numerous and vaguely similar imitations over the years.  Predominantly surrounding the use of comedy or absurdist theater as a coping mechanism for the Holocaust, the idea of mixing one of humankind’s most horrific events with laughter seemed unthinkable. 
 
Yet in 1996 Roberto Benigni’s Italian historical dramedy Life is Beautiful all but ran with the concept to enormous critical and commercial success, garnering three Academy Award wins including Best Actor.  Just a couple years later to lesser success was the remake of the Czech film Jakob the Liar starring Robin Williams, another exploration of the same cinematic concept which more or less utilized the actor’s skills for comedy to lift the spirits of those in suffering around him.
 
To my enormous surprise, it turns out even distinguished writer-director Paul Schrader took a stab at this subgenre in 2008 with much more peculiar yet fascinating and unexpectedly moving results.  Based on Yoram Kaniuk’s 1968 Israeli novel Adam Resurrected whose original title literally means “Adam, son of a dog”, the film stars Jeff Goldblum, Willem Dafoe and Derek Jacobi as well as a wealth of German movie stars in this chilly but curious Schrader effort.

Courtesy of MVD Visual
 
Set within a fictitious experimental insane asylum for Holocaust survivors in Israel 1961, the film follows Adam Stein (Jeff Goldblum), a patient suffering from PTSD from his experiences within the camp.  We learn through a series of disconnected flashbacks he was a comedian in Berlin prior to WWII and during a sketch he humiliates an SS officer named Commandant Klein (Willem Dafoe) before the audience.  Instead of executing him, Klein takes Stein in as his “pet” and makes behave like a dog with a collar and chain around his neck. 
 
Irreparably scarred by the degrading ordeal, Adam wallows within the asylum walls for fifteen years until one day he discovers a feral boy locked away within one of the rooms and is forced to confront his own demons in an effort to save the boy and perhaps himself.  Further still, the story piles on a thinly veiled messianic theme when Adam also learns he has a psychic ability and can read the lives of others simply by touching their clothing The Dead Zone style.  Near the end in a succession of hallucinatory scenes, Adam can even be seen walking the asylum corridors in clown makeup.
 
Oddball even for the man who probed so deeply into the human condition and psyche with Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters and Auto Focus, Adam Resurrected dares to jump the rails as the film’s plane of reality seems to get crazier with progress.  Keeping together what is surely one of the weirdest Holocaust dramas ever made however is Jeff Goldblum who goes the furthest out on a limb here since his turn in David Cronenberg’s The Fly.  Though Goldblum’s accent at times reminded me of Harvey Keitel’s SS guard with a Brooklyn accent from The Grey Zone, Schrader all but gives Goldblum free reign to channel a variety of emotional weathers that are equal parts inspired, manic and tormented.
 
Also always good in a Schrader effort is longtime collaborator Willem Dafoe who initially established a rapport with the director when making Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ.  Keeping with the themes of keeping faith in a world being drained dry of it, Adam Resurrected for Schrader followers echoes the director’s unfinished 2005 misfire Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist with the concepts of trying to keep one’s spirit together in the face of unspeakable Nazi atrocities. 

Courtesy of MVD Visual
 
Visually the film looks beautiful and was shot on locations in Romania, Israel and Germany by Black Death cinematographer Sebastian Edschmid though esteemed The English Patient composer Gabriel Yared’s synthesized score leaves something to be desired.  Still, going into a Schrader film you go for the performances and the way the director’s lens probes the framework of the character’s mind in order to find out what makes him tick.  In Schrader’s oeuvre, Adam Resurrected is a strange but interesting little movie with a rare chance to see Jeff Goldblum give his most impassioned performances as an actor in years!

--Andrew Kotwicki