Adam Resurrected 2008

      This film is based on a novel by Yoram Kaniuk.  Adam Stein is a charismatic patient at a mental institution for Holocaust survivors in Israel.  The year is 1961, Adam reads minds and confounds his doctors lead by Nathan Gross.  Before the war in Berlin, Adam was an entertainer.  He did acts as a cabaret impresario, circus owner, magician and musician.  He was loved by audiences and Nazis alike until he found himself in a concentration camp confronted by Commandant Klein.  Adam survives the camp by becoming the Commandant's “dog?”  He entertained Klein while his wife and daughter were sent off to die.  Years later he is at the Institute.  One day, Adam smells something and he hears a sound?  "Who brought a dog in here?" he asks Gross.  Gross denies there is a dog but Adam finds him.  He is a young boy raised in a basement on a chain.  Adam and the boy see and recognize each other as dogs and their journey together begins.  This is the story of a man who once was a dog who meets a dog who once was a boy.

     When the young boy arrives at the institute, Stein’s unexamined past can no longer remain in the past.  The boy is both an unwelcome reminder of his own prior debasement and an opportunity at present redemption.  At first, Stein is intent on keeping the boy locked in his feral state.  Then Stein becomes determined to help him transcend it.  He insists that the boy (and by extension himself) is “not a dog but he’s a man.”  While this seems unfairly contrived, it provides the structural means to tie the two historical time periods together.  From the first glimpse of the boy cowering in his cell with a bag with two eye slits draped over his head, to shots of Stein dragging the nearly naked kid around on all fours, a leash cruelly attached to his neck, Stein sees a series of images that suggest mankind’s possibility for debasement, even if the cause of the boy’s doglike regression remains unexplained.  Neatly rhyming with the crisp black-and-white shots from the camp segments this imagery evokes not only the horror but the essential absurdity of mass acts of inhumanity.  2 1/2* (This movie is so-so)

106 min, Drama directed by Paul Schrader and written by Noah Stollman with Jeff Goldblum, Willem Dafoe, Derek Jacobi, Ayelet Zurer, Hana Lasio, Joachim Krol, Evgenia Dodina, Tudor Rapiteanu, Veronica Ferres, Iran Alterman, Juliane Kohler, Dror Keren Shmuel Edelman, Yorma Toledano, Miki Leon.

Note:  Imdb 6.2* out of 10* with 3921 reviews, Rotten Tomatoes 35% with 37 critic reviews 44% with 500+ audience scores, Slant Magazine 2 1/2* out of 4* Andrew Schenker, Metacritic 588 out of 100 with 8 critic reviews, Letterboxd 2.9* out of 5*, Amazon 4* out of 5* with 143 reviews

Special Note:  The lines read at the beginning by Jeff Goldblum are a translation from the nineteenth century German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine's "In Der Fremde" (In Exile).  Heine was an exile and he spent his last years in Paris.  Moni Moshonov was cast as Arthur but he had to drop out due to a scheduling conflict.  He was replaced by comedian-actor Idan Alterman.