Adam Resurrected Movie
Storyline
TAGLINES
In a world gone mad, being insane was just a way to fit in.
A story of survival and redemption unlike any other.
"Adam Resurrected" follows the story of Adam Stein, a charismatic patient at a mental institution for Holocaust survivors in Israel, 1961. He reads minds and confounds his doctors, lead by Nathan Gross. Before the war, in Berlin, Adam was an entertainer—cabaret impresario, circus owner, magician, musician—loved by audiences and Nazis alike until he finds himself in a concentration camp, confronted by Commandant Klein. Adam survives the camp by becoming the Commandant's "dog", entertaining him while his wife and daughter are sent off to die. Years later we find him at the Institute. One day, Adam smells something, hears a sound. "Who brought a dog in here?" he asks Gross. Gross denies there is a dog but Adam finds him—a young boy raised in a basement on a chain. Adam and the boy see and recognize each other as dogs—and their journey begins. "Adam Resurrected" is the story of a man who once was a dog who meets a dog who once was a boy.
| Jeff Goldblum | Adam Stein |
| Willem Dafoe | Commandant Klein |
| Cristian Motiu | Volk |
| Vasile Albinet | Volk soldier nazi |
| Idan Alterman | Arthur |
| Moritz Bleibtreu | Joseph Gracci |
| Derek Jacobi | Dr. Nathan Gross |
| Dror Keren | Dr. Slonim |
| Joachim Król | Wolfowitz |
| Mickey Leon | |
| Gabriel Spahiu | Taub |
| Yoram Toledano | |
| Jenya Dodina | Gretchen |
| Veronica Ferres | |
| Juliane Köhler |
| Paul Schrader |
6.60 out of 10 (34 votes)
Visitor Reviews
Beautiful, Dark, Torrid and Powerful
posted on 13 Jul 2009I witnessed the triumph of this film from the beginning to end but, it was not an easy road for me to get at that state of mind. It starts slowly like an orchestra and wraps up in a crescendo of rebirth. I was uncomfortable at times with some scenes yet I felt they were completely relevant to the story line. This film's premise and subject matter is very torrid and twisted yet poetically bouts between the absurd and metaphorical. If I could compare this to a painting it would be a prime example of Picasso's cubism through the eyes of a camera; If I can dare to compare it. Jeff Goldboom's performance was serious and perfect for this role. Although sometimes, I could not help but to think of his past roles while I was seeing this but, that's just me. He was majestic and I though it was genius. I don't react favorably to tortured protagonists yet this time it was different. For the most part this character was a borderline martyr to his life, his family and duress; in every sense of the word. It's so beautifully done, with the simplicity of the mis- en-scence and the use of free from that it was hard to digest yet a delight. This is a must watch. Jeff my hat's off to you and to the director that put this very difficult adaptation into motion with such great of a success.
a state of grace
posted on 07 Jul 2009For me this film is about the guilt we feel for surviving, when better one and people we love don't. Its also about what makes us rise up to two when everything around us indicates we better kneel down to four.This is a strong film about strong feeling that every one who experienced lost can relate to, as we might find ourself some time in course of life deep in the bottom...This film was an amazing experience for me in that sense. The acting of Goldblum, the kid and all other members actors was excellent and moving.The directing however, was poor and in a way it was more like watching a theater show on screen then a movie. that the only thing I noticed that truly annoy me. that a pity...
A great escape from current reality
posted on 22 Apr 2009While the purpose of the comments here (to my understanding) are to help folks decide if they wish to see a film, I for one do not understand why it seems so important for some reviews to be so specifically critical. In fact "Author: uncertain from Poland" said it best "turn it off" but left out the most important part. That is His (or) Her opinion. So some did not like the film, then "turn it off" or don't watch it. But to react in such a ugly manor at makes it appear you have the only correct opinion as to the rest of humanity that might wish to see it? I just do not understand.While I may be just a "goy" and due to my upbringing, understand very little about the horrors and joys Jewish history. I for one found this film an excellent escape from my current reality. Showing yet another piece of "what could be", exposing more history that is too often swept under the rug. Isn't that what films are suppose to do? Provide some escape and provoke thought?"Never Again" rings so true, and those that some how managed to survive and continue I would imagine would all applaud the combined efforts of all the actors, directors, and staff for producing such a great film.If you do not like what you are seeing, stop looking, change the channel, if one has to be so negative (to sleep at night) I feel sorry for them. But attempt to control what I can view and think? Well, that is a battle left alone, as I tire of stooping to their level to acknowledge them. While everyone does have a right to their point of view, too many seem to think the world revolves around them, and not around us.I have been a fan of Mr Goldblum for many years, and this is (in my humble opinion) his best performance yet! I will be so very disappointed if he is not awarded an Academy Award for his performance in this movie. Dark as it may have been. Well worth seeing.
Fade to black 'Wow!'
posted on 18 Apr 2009This is the best movie I have seen in a very long time. A completely intriguing script, with some really good acting. Jeff Golblum is playing a Jewish man and lands a powerful and extraordinary performance. Although he has faults at the beginning with the accent, he clearly improves during the movie. This is not a gruesome war movie. In fact, I didn't see one person murdered. It's a psychological drama that revolves around the tormented soul that Jeff Golblum portrays. A tragedy mixed with really dark humour that will keep your attention for the entirety of the film. It's rare that you see Hollywood actors doing such dark, confronting, art-house kind of movies, but this one works and I'm going to recommend it to lots of people.
This movie is a joke
posted on 18 Apr 2009I went to Adam Resurrected expecting a holocaust movie, but what I got was a sick, weird, perverted film. This film had almost nothing to do with the holocaust. It followed a circus clown who, during the holocaust, was forced to act like a dog to avoid going to the camps. While this showed how brutal Nazis could be, I'm pretty sure this didn't even happen to ANYONE during the holocaust. This film is not art. Some have been saying the dog was "symbolism", but I don't care. This film was a piece of crap. Between his line (while having doggy style sex with his nurse...) "less like a schnauzer more like a wolf" and his line to the OTHER boy who thinks he's a dog (what are the chances of this?) "it's you and me against the world,", this dog themed holocaust movie was horrible. Should Jeff Goldblum get an Oscar? No. Unless they create a new category for "best human portraying a dog".
TIFF 08: Everyone likes the circus…Adam Resurrected
posted on 27 Mar 2009It all begins rather straight-forwardly. Stein was a clown and stage performer in Berlin, a man without politics, working with his wife and children to bring joy to those who attended his shows. Through flashbacks we see how his audience slowly becomes more and more Nazi, going from one stray soldier with swastika to a barroom full of military. He is eventually told he can no longer perform and, being Jewish, it is only a matter of time before he and his kin are placed on a train out of the ghetto and into a camp. Back in the present, however, his affable nature and overabundance of intelligence show a seemingly well-adjusted man, one the patients relate to, the doctors rely on to bridge the gap between them and the survivors, and who has seduced the head nurse, a woman half his age, into an affair that the head doctor knows about and turns the other way. You see Dr. Nathan Gross (Derek Jacobi) feels he can help Stein, knowing that there is something buried deep down inside him, a guilt we can only assume stems from the fact that his family is nowhere to be seen. It appears he has survived while the rest disappeared. Only by giving him some freedom and trust can he begin to try and help.Stein uses his charm and charisma, that which made him such a success on the stage in Germany, to become the favorite of all—laughing with the patients, not at them; engaging in his love affair with Ayelet Zurer's Nurse Grey; partaking in his secret stash of alcohol hidden away in every vent around the building; and just making the most of his stay, as though it's all a vacation. That is until one morning when he hears a distant barking. Discovering there is a dog in the hospital—something he was promised from day one would never occur—he begins to seek it out. Finally stumbling across the room with the animal, he gets down on all fours and turns into a canine himself. Barking, drooling, lashing out at the staff, Stein is not as put together as we had once thought.This all now leads to the true nature of the film. I believe it is the most original tale of WWII and the Holocaust that I have seen. While most these days focus on the camps and the battles and how much they affect those involved at the present, Adam Resurrected shows us the long-lasting ramifications being treated as an inferior, as an animal, that the experience had. The film is all about the psychological scarring the war left on these survivors, from the abuse, the torture, the separation from loved ones, and even the fact that they are alive while so many are not. One may call Adam Stein a lucky man for the series of events that transpired to him. Lucky that he was seen by a man for whom he read the mind of during one of his acts in Germany, a Commandant played by Willem Dafoe who took Stein under his wing to make him laugh and forget about the horrible things he was doing; lucky that all he had to do was pretend to be a dog, doing tricks for his master while all the other Jews worked outside biding their time until death. Only when you see the toying that went on, Stein desperately attempting to save his family, doing everything he is asked for by this man he saved from committing suicide not long ago, do you see how much easier it would have been if he had just been killed.Goldblum's Stein is a tour de force, a performance he spent a year researching and preparing for. This broken man has all his armor stripped away by the barking of some thing hidden under a sheet in a room. It is either a dog or maybe someone like him, someone degraded so much that he has become an animal in appearance as well as in spirit. Goldblum plays the magician to perfection, his quirkiness lending itself to the clownish way he goes about his life, but portrays the tortured soul to great effect too; a man able to control his own body, making it bleed, making it get sick, destroying himself over and over again as he does his best to help those around him, not yet in a healthy enough state to help himself. Utterly believable and completely transformed in his character, Adam Stein is whom we see on screen. A Holocaust survivor only starting to overcome the pain and sorrow inflicted upon him during the war and after, a man coming to grips with the fact that his name is not Stein but the number burned into his arm.I credit Schrader for directing a stellar film, allowing Goldblum to really perform his heart out for the duration, a time span for which he is in frame almost 100% of the time. The attention to detail is impeccable, right down to the toy train at the hospital, a locomotive that gets under Stein's skin, perhaps a little too much until we are shown the flashback to the train that transported the Jews, both exact replicas of each other, making that toy a symbol of his incarceration. Adam Resurrected is truly a story of his journey to find salvation, for himself and those around him. A great line comes from a response to one man's quest for God as follows, "God is out to lunch. He left a note; it's on your arm." Maybe God abandoned them all as he sat back and watched the atrocities occur, but these people, the doctors, patients, and Stein especially, won't give themselves that luxury. They are there for the long run, doing their best to survive and cope with the fact that they still have the gift of life, hopefully with enough time to make something of it.
unnecessary pretentious film
posted on 17 Mar 2009----- SPOILER ALERT -- SPOILER ALERT -- SPOILER ALERT -----This film is bad in every way! Normally i newer comment film here on IMDb, but this film is so extremely bad, that I gotta warn people against it. It got no story, you don't know exactly what the point is, is the main character good or bad and fast you don't care. The photography is boring, trying to become something and end up extremely pretentious. The symbolism is SO thick that you can have to use a big knife to cut trough it. Oh sweet Jesus. And the whole holocaust theme is simply pathetic. The main character, an old Jewish man, is so annoying, and everybody just adore him "because hes so magic" (blaaaahhh), so I actually cheered on the Germans. The use of voice-over is simply pathetic, and make the film even more pretentious. The scene where the nurse gets introduced says it all: You see the feets from a beautiful woman walking down a hall. The camera pans up and you see her sexy legs and you notice that she is wearing a nurse suit. The pan ends up at her ass and its a nice, sexy ass. When you see this pan, the voice-over say something like: "The nurse, her legs is so sexy, and her ass is the best". Duh... yes, that what we can see on the screen. Don't have to tell me like I'm an idiot. I feel sorry for all the Jews that died in WWII, but its still not an excuse for making such a horrible film. zero stars from me...
Good Movie, Good Performance
posted on 05 Feb 2009Jeff Goldlum does the best "Jeff Goldblum" in the business. If you hire him to do a "Jeff Goldblum" performance, it's like money in the bank. But _Adam Resurrected_ is not that. Goldblum's Adam is a nuanced, unpredictable and intelligent piece of work, the best of his career thus far. Indeed, the film as a whole represents a welcome return to adult themes and emotions. Sorrow, loss, power, human dignity, and human degradation are but some of the themes at work in Schrader's movie. Happily, we are not handed a tidy resolution (with the requisite "redemption" at the end), but a deep sense that life is a complicated, conflicted and layered experience. See this film when and if you get tired of CGI effects, Ben Stiller fart jokes and "the genius of Seth Rogen."
strange and stupid
posted on 19 Dec 2008There you have at least two great actors who really give what they can but there's no director.These two actors, Goldblum and Dafoe, are all alone in this insane brain sh... Nobody can explain them their purpose and so the audience is lost in this strange story which probably wants to make sense but there is no one who can press any sense and logic out of it.It probably could have been a movie that is strange and disturbing and which make you think about humor and hope but sadly it's a movie which is strange, embarrassing and stupid.There should have been a director, who is just as crazy as the story itself. I think Paul Schrader is a too boring person.
Stunning!
posted on 13 Dec 2008This is a highlight. "Adam resurrected" is a powerful narration about a German-Jewish Holocaust survivor and his struggle to cope with his traumata in a psycho-therapeutic clinic in Israel. Adam Stein, our protagonist, embodied by Jeff Goldblum, has survived a German concentration camp but lost his family. An SS-officer made him live and behave like a dog and it is only when another dog-like being arrives in the clinic that Stein finds a way to escape his manic world of excess. An extraordinarily mighty and brilliant performance by Jeff Goldblum who carries the whole movie to a difficult, funny and intense experience.
The last thing the world needs:
posted on 21 Nov 2008Another holocaust movie.How many times do we need to be told that Nazis=Bad, while Jews=Good? It's high time to stop living in the first half of the last century. Sure, bad things happened, but come on. How many different perspectives can there be? How many oddball points of view are there? A former circus entertainer who was spared the gas chamber and is now stuck in a mental institution specifically for holocaust survivors? Are you kidding me? Why not the story of a former Jewish mechanic who escaped the forced labor of evil Nazi kitchens where he peeled carrots for 21 hours a day, and who now makes cat food for a living in Guadalajara while moonlighting as a house painter? How much more random can it get? What does this story offer to history? In what way is humanity bettered by it? What lessons are learned? None. That's the answer. This is crap. Turn it off.
Adam Resurrected is a Disaster
posted on 18 Oct 2008I am a huge fan of both dark movies and independent films. When I went to go see Adam Resurrected at the AFI Dallas film festival, I was confident I would love it. Although people had warned me not to go see the film, I simply assumed they couldn't appreciate good film or "art." Boy, was I wrong- I should have taken their advice. Adam Resurrected is a complete joke. The performances are over-the-top and ridiculous, and the plot is- well- about a man in a mental institution who thinks he is a dog, who happens to mentor a young boy who ALSO thinks he's a dog .The man had been forced to act like a dog to survive the Holocaust and is now haunted by his "dog" past.This is not a joke.Watching Jeff Goldblum walk around on all fours eating dog bones and trying to interpret it as "art" is utterly ridiculous. Watching him change the life of a young boy/dog was even more ridiculous. And of course, the movie is trying to be a "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", for all of the crazy mental patients seem to idolize Goldblum. The mental patients give unbelievably over-the-top performances, and the sex scenes involving Goldblum and the nurse (I will never forget his line when she gets on all fours for him and barks- "Less like a shnauzer, more like a wolf!") are truly horrendous. This movie is pretentious and trying to be profound, yet it is actually a complete joke. It is incredibly disrespectful to any Holocaust survivors to portray a man forced to bark like a dog for a Nazi general as one of the hardships the Jews faced. DON'T SEE THIS FILM.
If this movie was based on a true story, might have a chance, but it's fiction and scary
posted on 02 Oct 2008Jeff acting is great, like always. It's the whole theme of the movie, dark and just a little wacky at times, like getting turned on if the woman barks like a dog. I would totally understand if this movie was based on a true story and the movie is a interpretation of the book or something, but it's not. It's fiction story based on a holocaust survivor. Just makes you think what's going on inside of the head of these writers to write such a fictional event. Relating a human to a dog and getting turned on by watching a human bark like a dog. It maybe disturbing for some, and I see the reason why HowardStern found it disturbing as well.Acting/performance is great, director shot is great. Just a shame so much talent and performance went into a fictional storyline that's a bit on the disturbing side.
A story about survivor's guilt
posted on 18 Aug 2009I am surprised at the hatefully negative reviews this movie has gotten. But then I suppose anything that handles a truly dark subject matter, and doesn't spoon feed the audience doesn't get much praise.This movie is excellent with excellent performances. I didn't mind the accent because it doesn't matter. The meaning of the movie, and the metaphors of film employed are brilliant.The movie details the struggle of a former circus performer and celebrity with his guilt over surviving his family in the holocaust. Goldblum portrays a man who finds insanity more comfortable then sanity, because sanity brings with it sad truths.