Adam Resurrected

Adam Resurrected

106 Minutes

In Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's UK comedy series Extras, Kate Winslet, playing a parodic version of herself playing a nun in a Holocaust film (stick with me on this), remarks, "How many more movies do we need about the Holocaust? I mean, we get it: it was grim." Making a Holocaust film is such an "easy," prestige thing to do. So long as you're not making Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS and a fairly capable filmmaker, your film will likely be critic-proof and the hoi polloi will think it an accurate depiction of the trauma of the Holocaust. It doesn't even necessarily have to say anything new about the human condition so long as it's effectively depressing.

Paul "Taxi Driver" Schrader certainly has something to say about the Holocaust with Adam Resurrected, featuring Jeff Goldblum and his indecipherable German accent as Adam Stein, a vaudevillian performer and magician who managed to survive the Holocaust by becoming the personal pet (no, literally) of a Nazi Commandant (Willem Dafoe) and now resides in a mental asylum for Holocaust survivors in 1960s Israel. While there, Stein meets a boy who was raised from birth to think he's a dog and works to teach him how to be human.

Yes, despite the One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest-meets-massive-genocide trappings, one can still see it as a story of the unbreakable human spirit. It wouldn't seem so pedestrian if much of the film weren't so by-the-numbers. The flashbacks contain the usual arc of a Holocaust story: life is beautiful and then the Nazis come in and commit some mild injustices like shooting your bear (no, seriously) before eventually putting you on a train. As for the asylum scenes, they're full of the usual slouching crazies who either gesture strangely or carry funny props so we know they're nuts.

While the film is ostensibly about survivor guilt, more interesting is the film's depiction of the way detainer and detainee (or, more accurately, master and slave) fetishize one another. In flashbacks, Dafoe (an otherwise sexless milquetoast gone power-mad) puts Goldblum on a leash and makes him bark like a dog and fight with a real dog for scraps. In the film's present, Goldblum makes the asylum's Nazi-like head nurse bark like a dog and roll around on the floor before taking her from behind.

If that sounds perverse, that's because it is. This is the film's one saving grace: Schrader's love for the depraved, as shown in films like Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters and Auto Focus, is here in full force. It keeps Adam Resurrected from being any other ho-hum Oscar bait prestige picture, but it's not quite enough even for a film that ends with Goldblum putting on clown makeup, popping a handful of pills and running out into the desert.

Alas, there's a level of dark comedy necessary for a film about Holocaust survivor mental patients, and Adam Resurrected seems to think it has it. Schrader has made a piece of Oscar bait too twisted to win any sort of award yet too highbrow to wallow in its strangeness like it needs to. If Adam Resurrected were made by a Polish filmmaker, it would have been as disturbing and pitch-black comedic as the material so desperately wants to be. As it is, Adam Resurrected has to settle for being a curiosity.

by Danny Djeljosevic