Adam Resurrected
By: Amy Nicholson
Stranger films exist, but they’re usually made by goth nerds in their basement lair or Canadian oddball auteur Guy Maddin. Jeff Goldblum stars as Adam, a Wiemar cabaret magician who survived the Holocaust only to become the lothario king of a mental ward in the outskirts of Tel Aviv who might be either a murderer or the true son of God. Adam is prone to violent stigmata; when he touches a person in pain, he bleeds. Paul Schrader’s unusual and under-rationalized film is a schizophrenic fantasia—the screenplay by Yoram Kaniuk (based on Noah Stollman’s novel) prizes disorientation. But in between Schrader’s too-jokey directorial flourishes lurks several satisfyingly disturbing sequences that unearth the reason for (some) of Adam’s current mania: the years he spent imprisoned under the Nazi Commandant Klein (a chilly Willem Dafoe) who forced him—literally—to be his pet, crawling on floors and fighting a German Shepard for bones. Still, the worst torture is guilt; Adam may have been debased, but he wasn’t dead —unlike his family. The entrance of a wild child (Tudor Rapiteanu) with his own canine proclivities spins the script into more chaos. This is the rare film that is memorable, affecting, and bad. (Amy Nicholson)
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