Adam Resurrected

Though it boasts one of the most compelling performances of Jeff Goldblum’s career, Adam Resurrected ultimately comes off as a colossal misfire that simply isn’t able to hold one’s interest for more than a few minutes at a time. Goldblum stars as Adam Stein, a Jewish entertainer who finds himself forced to become a Nazi officer’s (Willem Dafoe’s Commandant Klein) pet during the Second World War – though the bulk of the film revolves around Stein’s egregiously quirky modern-day escapades within a hospital for mentally-unstable Jewish war survivors. There’s little doubt that the scarce flashback stuff quickly proves to be the highlight within Adam Resurrected, as director Paul Schrader – along with cinematographer Sebastian Edschmid – does a nice job of bringing a unique spin to the exceedingly familiar terrain of a Nazi concentration camp. But such sequences form a very small part of Adam Resurrected‘s plodding run-time, with the dominant mental-hospital stuff striking all the wrong notes right from the get-go. The inherently stagy nature of such scenes is exacerbated by the increasingly quirky and downright surreal nature of Noah Stollman’s screenplay. It’s subsequently impossible to care at all about Stein’s plight within the institution, despite the presence of such talented supporting performers as Derek Jacobi, Moritz Bleibtreu, and Ayelet Zurer. The inexplicable, almost surreal conclusion doesn’t do the movie any favors, and it’s finally impossible to view Adam Resurrected as anything other than a wrong-headed and surprisingly interminable failure from prolific filmmaker Schrader.

*1/2 out of ****