(Complete interview with Paul Schrader available here.)
Adam Resurrected is the new movie by Paul Schrader (Affliction, Auto-Focus) premiering here at Telluride 2008. I was at the first screening which was also the first time Schrader ever watched the movie with an audience. “I realized watching it how exhausting it is, ” he told me right after the screening, “And it’s full of extremes. Literally, that old saying ‘you don’t know whether to laugh or cry’ is true here, and some scenes I think either emotion is fine with me.”
It’s in the navigation of extremes that my crush on Jeff Goldblum, who plays the title character, was born. I’m not one to get into Oscar buzz, but I will with Jeff and even add easily excerpted blurbs: Jeff Goldblum is magnificent. Jeff Godlblum’s peformance is a tour de force. I want to make out with Jeff Goldblum in the back of his Toyota Prius. Like how Daniel Day-Lewis’ character, Daniel Plainview (There Will be Blood), would have seemed flat or absurd in another actor’s hands, Jeff Goldblum’s wry delivery and velvet wit take the absurdity of Adam Stein and make him believable.
Based on the wildly imaginative novel by Yoram Kaniuk, Adam Resurrected begins in 1961 in Tel Aviv where an aging, witty and debonair Adam Stein has gotten a little too rough with his landlord/girlfriend and she has him committed again to the Seizling Institute out in the Negev desert. Founded by an American philanthropist, the institute is an asylum for concentration camp survivors living in Israel. It’s purpose is to somehow restore a reason to care about humanity and god when they carry the weight of being survivors to unspeakable horrors perpetrated on everyone they loved. Each patient is a walking abstraction of a type of survivor: A speechless woman carrying a babydoll, a young man who was a Nazi servant, a man who couldn’t protect his daughter.
Adam Stein is a susperstar in the asylum. The head nurse (Ayelet Zurer) is his mistress, Dr. Gross (Derek Jacobi) his biggest fan. A famous performer in Berlin, Adam was a one man circus who could throw knives, read minds, play violin, do magic, impersonate animals and, strangely, cause himself to bleed on command. Through flashbacks, we see his rise from a Cabaret performer in 1924 to a celebrity in 1936. One night as he works the audience, he reads the mind of an unstable audience member–played by Willem Dafoe–and makes him the butt of a joke. In 1945 when Adam and his family enter a concentration camp, Willem Dafoe has become Commandant Klein, head of the camp. He belittles Adam by getting him to impersonate a dog and charm his German Shepherd. From that night on, Adam literally becomes the Commandant’s pet: A dog whose a man.
At the asylum, he finds what he thinks to be a dog. As if lifted from some horrific parallel dimension, the dog is a boy brought to the asylum. If Adam can turn this dog into a boy again, then maybe he can put away his past as a dog, as the commandant’s pet who survived the camp where his wife and daughters were brutalized.
When I asked Paul Schrader what sparked his interest i the book he said, “Just the strength of the metaphor: The man who once was a dog who meets a dog who once was a boy. I’m not jewish, I’m not as invested as some others in issues of survival guilt and Jewish identity, but that aside, these are really universal themes.” It is universal. Dense with emotion and humor, Adam Resurrected is about the complicated path back from being treated as a dog, a non-human, to becoming a full person again. It’s a powerful metaphor that could have crushed another actor, but it’s the part Jeff Goldblum has been building up to his entire career.
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SpoutBlog » Paul Moore