SHOWTIMES: 8:15p - TUE 2/23
PART OF THE 2010 ATHENS JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL
In a world gone mad, being insane is a way to fit in. Adam Resurrected features Jeff Goldblum as Adam Klein, a Holocaust survivor (once a popular music hall clown and gifted performer) afflicted with post-Holocaust suppressed survivor's guilt. By delving into a raw, absurdist world where man is dog, and dog is man, Adam finds a way to heal himself. Based on the novel "Man, Son of Dog" (אדם בן כלב, Adam Ben Kelev), by Yoram Kaniuk, the film is a co-production, USA, Germany, and Israel. Rated R: language, nudity, violence.
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In a stunning lead performance, Goldblum stars as a brilliant, apolitical jester whose wife and family end up in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Goldblum survives by reluctantly agreeing to act as the pet dog of warped fan Willem Dafoe, a Nazi officer who remembers Goldblum's pre-camp fame and exploits his gift for physical comedy in the creepiest manner imaginable. After the war, Goldblum lives in an Israeli mental hospital for Holocaust survivors, where he carries on a sordid affair with one of the nurses and becomes a curious father figure to a dog-boy who blossoms under his tutelage.
Goldblum's simultaneously subhuman and superhuman madman quasi-messiah is a financial genius who's irresistible to women, reads minds, can make himself bleed, and is haunted ineffably by demons he can't begin to fathom, let alone control. Yet Goldblum sells this wildly theatrical character through sheer magnetism. The otherworldly nature of his restless, nervous charisma has seldom been put to better use. Even when it flies off the rails deep into its third act, Resurrected remains strangely hypnotic. Though Schrader and Goldblum have transformed Kaniuk's book into a film as insane as any of its characters, its source material somehow retains its air of unfilmability. That's just one of this film's many strange paradoxes.
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