Only filmmaker Paul Schrader, seemingly a masochist for difficult film topics, could have conceived of directing “Adam Resurrected” (he wrote it based on Israeli author Yoram Kaniuk’s acclaimed 1968 novel).
Is it brilliant absurdism? Or is it a flat-out misguided and painful joke? Considering Schrader’s awful, “Auto-Focus” in 2002, we’re sort of siding with the latter, but people did say that “The Walker” was fairly decent, no? (ok, only a 52% RT rating; for those keeping score, yes, Schrader wrote Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull,” we should all know that by now).
Ok, so what is this audacious, bordering-on-insane picture about? Well, it’s apparently a “caustic black comedy” bout a Berlin magician and Holocaust survivor, Adam Stein (played Jeff Goldblum, who is rather good despite the outrageousness of it all), who tries to purge his traumatic experiences at a mysterious Israeli mental institution. He seems a hopeless case until he meets with a peculiar young patient who reminds him of one most brutal adversaries, Commandant Klein (Willem Dafoe) who made him act and behave and walk on all fours like a dog for a year to amuse him and mollify the brutal reality of the Holocaust (no really, we’re not fucking kidding).
Vulture has an interview with Goldblum and writes, “[the actor] has not only to affect a German accent but also has to run through an almost inconceivable gamut of emotions.” This is true, but Goldblum and the movie border on farce and his Deutschland accent is terrible!
It’s not a particularly revealing interview, but apparently this novel was beloved in Israel, so Goldblum had to do his homework to get it right. But the actor does note, “[when it was first written], Charlie Chaplin had called Yoram Kaniuk over the phone and barked about how he had to play this part. And Orson Welles had also wanted to make it a movie at one point.”
‘Resurrected’ currently has a 30% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and we sort of vaguely agree with the New York Observer’s Andrew Sarris who says, “I can tentatively recommend it if only because there has never been anything like it in the history of cinema as far as I can remember.” We can’t really review it per se (at least not right now, we just saw it and are still trying to process), because on some level it’s so exasperatingly preposterous and awful that it becomes vaguely interesting. And we’re not ones to champion so-bad-it’s-good irony, but there will be some people out there that could turn its absurdism into a cult classic (some reviews are scathing though and are worth reading for their humor alone).
“Adam Resurrected” could end up being this year’s “Southland Tales,” a film thats ridiculousness was mistaken for profundity by critics like Time Out New York’s Melissa Anderson who put it on her Top 2007 Year-End List (a permanent blemish on her record). If she places Schrader’s quasi-disaster/train-wreck interesting curiosity in her top 2008, you know she will have forfeited all good will within the film critic circles for the rest of eternity [ed. yes, it’s based on a book and all the ridiculousness is from the book, yes, we get that still…you have to see this thing to understand what we’re talking about].
