movie review: Adam Resurrected

The story of Adam Resurrected will be familiar to American audiences in so far as it resembles that classic of modern literature, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Israeli author Yoram Kaniuk’s 1968 novel, brought to the screen here by Paul Schrader, centers around the arrival of an unusual, energizing presence at a psychiatric hospital. The protagonist, Adam Stein, a fast-talking, charismatic charmer with a hearty appetite for women and drink, has much the same effect on his fellow patients as Randle Patrick McMurphy does in Ken Kesey’s tale, instilling confidence and hope, and stressing the importance of laughter. Both characters are emotionally unstable, possessing violent streaks just beneath the surface that reflect the severe psychological traumas in their respective pasts. The nature of those traumas and their depictions are what distinguishes these stories and their heroes: McMurphy escaped from a Chinese POW camp during the Korean War; Stein survived slavery at a Nazi concentration camp. And while McMurphy’s wartime experiences are represented hazily, occupying the forefront in neither the book nor Milos Forman’s film, the horrors of Stein’s past are always present in Adam Resurrected.

The film begins in 1961 as Stein (Jeff Goldblum), following an aggressive outburst in which he choked his landlady, returns to the Seizling Institute for Therapy and Rehab, a fictional facility in the Negev desert in southern Israel that specializes in the treatment of Holocaust survivors. Between scenes of him clowning with the other patients (familiar caricatures of the mentally ill) and titillating his fiery, compassionate nurse (Ayelet Zurer in a performance that commands attention), his past is revealed through a series of flashbacks.

A couple of lively sequences establish Stein as a popular entertainer who worked burlesque shows and cabarets in Berlin throughout the ‘20s and ‘30s until his Jewish heritage marked him for internment. The transitions from present to past might best be described as clunky; upon seeing a model train set at the hospital, Stein’s eyes open wide with terror, and suddenly the film cuts to a shot of him and his family standing huddled aboard a locomotive to the Nazi camp, in black and white, no less.

At the concentration camp, we watch as Stein is made to grovel at the feet, literally, of Commandant Klein (Willem Dafoe as evil incarnate), who forbids Stein to speak and instead trains him to crawl on all fours around his office and emulate the sounds and mannerisms of a domesticated dog. His job, says Klein, remains the same as it was onstage: “to comfort and entertain.” After the war, Stein is racked with guilt for having survived, albeit on a subhuman level, while his wife and daughter were dispatched to mass graves.

Back in the present, the Seizling Institute is run by Dr. Nathan Gross (Derek Jacobi), who is stuffy and irritable but smart enough to overlook Stein’s reckless sex and drinking habits because he knows the man can help his patients. Gross has marked one case in particular for Stein’s healing touch – a severely abused boy who has been raised to behave like a dog, barking, crawling, and rabid. The crux of the film lies in the interaction between Stein and this frightened, debased child.

Goldblum gives himself entirely to the role, spanning the gamut of emotions as a man that’s playful, impulsive, inspiring, damaged. He deserves credit for carrying the brunt of the workload and giving some coherence to a story and character that lack focus. As if Adam Stein wasn’t already complex enough to carry a film, he also reads minds, and bleeds suddenly from his feet, among other places. I mention these traits only in passing because that’s how the film treats them; breezed over, they function almost entirely as abstract religious symbols.

The picture stumbles most in its treatment of the relationship between Stein and the boy. Here, again, Goldblum’s effort is valiant, but the child is not so much a character as an idea. He embodies what Stein once was: a being in a state of degradation that, when reached, can never be forgotten, no matter how hard one tries. Their relationship embodies some of the film’s core ideas: that empathy is crucial to therapy; that the healing process is a struggle for both the doctor and the patient. But it’s frustrating that when the film finishes, for all his time on screen, we’re left with no clue as to who this boy is, or was, or will be. Randle McMurphy, too, inspired a mute to speak; but Chief Bromden was an individual in his own right.

An ambitious film, Adam Resurrected features a couple of genuinely humorous bits, courtesy of Goldblum, and a wealth of important messages, the most resonant being an obvious one that’s still worth repeating – that the suffering of the Holocaust lasted long after the defeat of Hitler and the Nazi party. Nevertheless, Adam Resurrected bites off more than it can chew. This is especially apparent in the film’s climax, if one can call it that, which arrives suddenly and fails to wrap anything up – and that might have been fine, except that the ending purports a degree of tidiness that’s unearned. It’s difficult to justify enduring the basest humiliations of grown men and children alike for a film that’s so uneven, whose effectiveness is so intermittent.