On paper, Paul
Schrader's mind-meltingly odd new film, Adam Resurrected, sounds disconcertingly like The Day The
Clown Cried, the notorious unreleased Jerry
Lewis monstrosity about a clown who leads children into the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
Actually, to give Schrader and co-conspirator Jeff Goldblum full credit for
their lunatic ambition, Adam may
be even crazier than Lewis' comedy-drama; for all its surreal bad taste, Clown probably doesn't feature a protagonist with psychic
gifts, a burning bush in the Israeli desert, and a feral wolf-boy who forms a
strong emotional bond with a man who lived extensively in the role of a dog in
a concentration camp. Yes, Resurrected has the potential to be not just awful, but a crime against cinema,
taste, and solid judgment. Not being offensively terrible consequently counts
as one of the film's strongest virtues.
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.
Adam
Resurrected is filled with the kind of
quirky novelistic conceits that tend to kill on the page, yet die embarrassing
deaths onscreen. Unsurprisingly, Resurrected is based on a novel: Yoram Kaniuk's 1968 book of the
same name. 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.