Adam Resurrected (2008) Reviews

• A story about survivor's guilt

  ZenShark2009-08-06

  I am surprised at the hatefully negative reviews this movie has gotten. But then I suppose anything that handles a truly dark subject matter, and doesn't spoon feed the audience doesn't get much praise. This movie is excellent with excellent performances. I didn't mind the accent because it doesn't matter. The meaning of the movie, and the metaphors of film employed are brilliant. The movie details the struggle of a former circus performer and celebrity with his guilt over surviving his family in the holocaust. Goldblum portrays a man who finds insanity more comfortable then sanity, because sanity brings with it sad truths.

• TIFF 08: Everyone likes the circus…Adam Resurrected

  jaredmobarak2008-09-15

  It all begins rather straight-forwardly. Stein was a clown and stage performer in Berlin, a man without politics, working with his wife and children to bring joy to those who attended his shows. Through flashbacks we see how his audience slowly becomes more and more Nazi, going from one stray soldier with swastika to a barroom full of military. He is eventually told he can no longer perform and, being Jewish, it is only a matter of time before he and his kin are placed on a train out of the ghetto and into a camp. Back in the present, however, his affable nature and overabundance of intelligence show a seemingly well-adjusted man, one the patients relate to, the doctors rely on to bridge the gap between them and the survivors, and who has seduced the head nurse, a woman half his age, into an affair that the head doctor knows about and turns the other way. You see Dr. Nathan Gross (Derek Jacobi) feels he can help Stein, knowing that there is something buried deep down inside him, a guilt we can only assume stems from the fact that his family is nowhere to be seen. It appears he has survived while the rest disappeared. Only by giving him some freedom and trust can he begin to try and help. Stein uses his charm and charisma, that which made him such a success on the stage in Germany, to become the favorite of all—laughing with the patients, not at them; engaging in his love affair with Ayelet Zurer's Nurse Grey; partaking in his secret stash of alcohol hidden away in every vent around the building; and just making the most of his stay, as though it's all a vacation. That is until one morning when he hears a distant barking. Discovering there is a dog in the hospital—something he was promised from day one would never occur—he begins to seek it out. Finally stumbling across the room with the animal, he gets down on all fours and turns into a canine himself. Barking, drooling, lashing out at the staff, Stein is not as put together as we had once thought. This all now leads to the true nature of the film. I believe it is the most original tale of WWII and the Holocaust that I have seen. While most these days focus on the camps and the battles and how much they affect those involved at the present, Adam Resurrected shows us the long-lasting ramifications being treated as an inferior, as an animal, that the experience had. The film is all about the psychological scarring the war left on these survivors, from the abuse, the torture, the separation from loved ones, and even the fact that they are alive while so many are not. One may call Adam Stein a lucky man for the series of events that transpired to him. Lucky that he was seen by a man for whom he read the mind of during one of his acts in Germany, a Commandant played by Willem Dafoe who took Stein under his wing to make him laugh and forget about the horrible things he was doing; lucky that all he had to do was pretend to be a dog, doing tricks for his master while all the other Jews worked outside biding their time until death. Only when you see the toying that went on, Stein desperately attempting to save his family, doing everything he is asked for by this man he saved from committing suicide not long ago, do you see how much easier it would have been if he had just been killed. Goldblum's Stein is a tour de force, a performance he spent a year researching and preparing for. This broken man has all his armor stripped away by the barking of some thing hidden under a sheet in a room. It is either a dog or maybe someone like him, someone degraded so much that he has become an animal in appearance as well as in spirit. Goldblum plays the magician to perfection, his quirkiness lending itself to the clownish way he goes about his life, but portrays the tortured soul to great effect too; a man able to control his own body, making it bleed, making it get sick, destroying himself over and over again as he does his best to help those around him, not yet in a healthy enough state to help himself. Utterly believable and completely transformed in his character, Adam Stein is whom we see on screen. A Holocaust survivor only starting to overcome the pain and sorrow inflicted upon him during the war and after, a man coming to grips with the fact that his name is not Stein but the number burned into his arm. I credit Schrader for directing a stellar film, allowing Goldblum to really perform his heart out for the duration, a time span for which he is in frame almost 100% of the time. The attention to detail is impeccable, right down to the toy train at the hospital, a locomotive that gets under Stein's skin, perhaps a little too much until we are shown the flashback to the train that transported the Jews, both exact replicas of each other, making that toy a symbol of his incarceration. Adam Resurrected is truly a story of his journey to find salvation, for himself and those around him. A great line comes from a response to one man's quest for God as follows, "God is out to lunch. He left a note; it's on your arm." Maybe God abandoned them all as he sat back and watched the atrocities occur, but these people, the doctors, patients, and Stein especially, won't give themselves that luxury. They are there for the long run, doing their best to survive and cope with the fact that they still have the gift of life, hopefully with enough time to make something of it.

• Good Movie, Good Performance

  marksalerno19822009-03-14

  Jeff Goldlum does the best "Jeff Goldblum" in the business. If you hire him to do a "Jeff Goldblum" performance, it's like money in the bank. But _Adam Resurrected_ is not that. Goldblum's Adam is a nuanced, unpredictable and intelligent piece of work, the best of his career thus far. Indeed, the film as a whole represents a welcome return to adult themes and emotions. Sorrow, loss, power, human dignity, and human degradation are but some of the themes at work in Schrader's movie. Happily, we are not handed a tidy resolution (with the requisite "redemption" at the end), but a deep sense that life is a complicated, conflicted and layered experience. See this film when and if you get tired of CGI effects, Ben Stiller fart jokes and "the genius of Seth Rogen."

• Fade to black 'Wow!'

  day_andy2009-05-13

  This is the best movie I have seen in a very long time. A completely intriguing script, with some really good acting. Jeff Golblum is playing a Jewish man and lands a powerful and extraordinary performance. Although he has faults at the beginning with the accent, he clearly improves during the movie. This is not a gruesome war movie. In fact, I didn't see one person murdered. It's a psychological drama that revolves around the tormented soul that Jeff Golblum portrays. A tragedy mixed with really dark humour that will keep your attention for the entirety of the film. It's rare that you see Hollywood actors doing such dark, confronting, art-house kind of movies, but this one works and I'm going to recommend it to lots of people.

• A doomed masterpiece

  itamarscomix2011-09-23

  A masterpiece doomed to go unrecognized. Not too many people would like it or even sit through it, but in fact it's one of the best holocaust-related films ever made. Hateful reviews have commented on the fact that the film is disturbing and weird - or about the absurdity of a man surviving the holocaust by acting like a dog for the entertainment of a Nazi officer; is it any more absurd than the idea of people stamped with numbers or shoved into ovens? In the face of a horrifically absurd reality, insanity is often a valid option. Most WWII films center on the partisans, the heroes, the ones who kept their dignity and humanity in the face of genocide. But not everyone did. A major goal of Hitler's action was not just to destroy the Jews, but to dehumanize them first. And in many cases it worked. That's what this film is about - the loss of humanity, the feelings of guilt shared by the ones who survived at the expense of their own most basic human dignities, and it's small wonder that it's difficult for most to swallow. Paul Schrader made a fantastic job adapting Yoram Kanyuk's novel; reviews blaming him of 'emotional detachment' miss the point that this detachment is very intentional. The cold and distant feeling experienced while watching it is very different from the pathos of Schindler's List or Life Is Beautiful, and, rather than draw the viewer into the actual events, brings them face to face with their very madness and incomprehensibility. Jeff Goldblum portrays that feeling perfectly in what may be the most powerful performance of his career - reminding me, at times, of Roy Scheider in All That Jazz. Master-character actors Willem Dafoe and Derek Jacobi compliment him perfectly without stealing the show, and some of Israel's biggest stars join in to complete the ensemble cast. Bottome line - a terrific film, and instantly a favorite of mine, but I hesitate to recommend it to anyone for fear of being blamed for it later. Watch it at your own risk, with an open mind, and with an empty stomach.