Roundtable. Adam Resurrected.

Reviewing Adam Resurrected for Screen, David D'Arcy noted that the "Holocaust is a new subject for director Paul Schrader, a Calvinist from Michigan, who infuses drama and physical comedy into Yoram Kaniuk's matter-of-fact tone in the novel. Yet the subject is not entirely foreign. As with the protagonists of Taxi Driver and Affliction, Adam Stein is consumed by grueling inner turmoil - in this case, by the guilt of a survivor whose family perished. Schrader navigates this emotional territory effectively."

At the main site, David talks with Schrader, Kaniuk ("one of the most innovative, brilliant novelists in the Western World," as the New York Times has put it) and producer Ehud Bleiberg about the challenges of adapting a novel Susan Sontag once compared to the work of Gabriel García Márquez.

Updated through 12/16.

"There's no joy to be had in enumerating the shortcomings of Adam Resurrected," writes Eric Hynes at indieWIRE. "But in most respects the film just doesn't click: tone stumbles and fumbles meaning, dialogue meanders above uneven visuals, and scenes herk and jerk, frustrating momentum. An arrhythmic quality might well evoke the literary source (which I have not read), but Paul Schrader's feature is no better for it."

"At once overstuffed and underimagined, Adam Resurrected is an intermittently fascinating, often indifferent mess of a picture, a film that has occasional moments of overwhelming power and many more that leave the viewer completely cold," writes Andrew Schenker in Slant. "Still, with so many films that make 1940s Germany look as delightfully quaint as Victorian England, it's refreshing to see a movie that doesn't betray the memory of the six million through the cheap comforts of historical distancing. If nothing else, the legacy of the Holocaust feels very much alive in Schrader's picture."

"Adam Resurrected has a slackness that makes one think Paul Schrader had to actively try to maintain interest in his project during production," finds Nick Schager.

Updates, 12/10: "The torturer's greatest art, so it is said, is to make his victims go on torturing themselves - for life, if possible," writes FX Feeney in the Voice. "That certainly seems the fate of Adam Stein (Jeff Goldblum), a Jewish comedian of genius in prewar Berlin, who is unable to save his family when the Nazi genocide overtakes them and only survives a concentration camp himself by becoming the literal pet of the camp's Commandant (Willem Dafoe).... Goldblum is ideally, even blazingly suited to such a role - it is hard to recall when, if ever, a part has asked more of his actorly gifts - and his scenes with Dafoe in the concentration camp are painful in the best sense. Where Fellini made ecstasy contagious, Schrader is after much darker vistas - the mystery of how good men fail, and condemn themselves. One cannot recommend this film strongly enough."

"Though Adam Resurrected may sound like an odd approach to a Holocaust movie, it helps to think of it as a film concerned more generally with survivor guilt," writes Benjamin H Sutton in the L Magazine. "How does one reintegrate a world millions of others were unjustly erased from? Grappling with his place in a post-Holocaust world, Goldblum is alternately delightful, terrifying and sorrowful, and his doggy-style sex-play with nurse Gina Grey (Ayelet Zurer) is all three at once."

"The Adam-Klein synergy constitutes the dominant dramatic relationship in the film, because of the Goldblum-Dafoe high-voltage acting electricity," writes Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer. "If I have made the movie seem a bit insane, I must admit that I have only scratched the surface of its massive strangeness. Still, I can tentatively recommend it if only because there has never been anything like it in the history of cinema as far as I can remember."

Update, 12/11: Online viewing tips. FilmCatcher interviews Jeff Goldblum and Paul Schrader.

"Once upon a time, Goldblum was a talented, versatile actor," writes Mark Peikert in the New York Press; "but over the years he's gradually morphed into one of the more mannered supporting performers in American film. His stylized line readings, with sudden gasps for air in the middle of his dialogue, is as easily recognizable (and mockable) as Christopher Walken's more imitated speech patterns."

Updates, 12/13: "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." Nathan Rabin at the AV Club: "Actually, to give Schrader and co-conspirator Jeff Goldblum full credit for their lunatic ambition, Adam may be even crazier than Lewis's comedy-drama... 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."

"Mr Goldblum's tour-de-force performance, alas, is not enough to transmit a steady emotional current through the movie," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times.

Lawrence Levi talks with Goldblum for Nextbook.

Online listening tip. Ed Champion talks with Schrader.

Updates, 12/16: Bilge Ebiri talks with Goldblum for Vulture.

Online listening tip. Schrader's a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Posted by dwhudson at December 9, 2008 8:12 AM