missybluesblog

Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

Penned by Noah Stollman from Yoram Kaniuk’s controversial 1971 Israeli
novel, Adam Resurrected, that’s helmed by Paul Schrader (”Blue Collar”/”Hardcore”/”Light
Sleeper”). It’s a bleak Holocaust survivor drama with no justifiable purpose
but seemingly to bring back bad memories of the concentration camps and
a chance for Jeff Goldblum to give a forceful performance in a very forgettable
film (it has little entertainment or social value, and seems to use the
Holocaust survivors for tasteless dark comedy bits). 

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It’s set in the Israeli Negev Desert in 1961 where Nazi survivor
of the camps, Adam Stein (Jeff Goldblum), is being treated with other survivors
in an innovative mental institution by Dr. Gross (Derek Jacobi). Adam was
a famous former German-Jewish circus clown, mind-reader, magician, knife
thrower and nightclub performer in Berlin during the 1930s. We soon learn
that he survived the death camps because he played the violin while fellow
Jews, including his wife and daughter, were led into the crematoriums and
because a sadistic camp commander, Commandant Klein (Willem Dafoe), recognized
Germany’s most famous clown and had Adam perversely entertain him by impersonating
his Jew-hating German Shepherd dog to take his mind off his arduous job.
The story builds tension around Adam’s flashbacks to his Berlin circus
days and the degradation of the camps. 

With his great ability to read minds and trace animal scents, the
brilliant but insane Adam discovers the mental facility is secretly treating
a young boy, David (Tudor Rapiteanu, Romanian newcomer), who has spent
his entire life locked in a basement and chained to a wall until he thinks
he’s a dog. Over time, these two get to meet and recognize that they are
kindred souls (each survives acting like a dog) and both find a remarkable
path to recovery–thus the title. 

The soul-searching film never gets to what it wants to say without
seeming awkward and, at times, it’s as subtle as a sledgehammer hitting
us over the head. It offers little justification for a viewer to sit through
such a depressing film.