Adam Resurrected

Most holocaust films concentrate on the suffering of those in the camps but as someone from the second generation (second generation are people with a parent who was either in a concentration camp or a parent who was a child and orphaned due to the holocaust) I know the psychological damage the holocaust had on my mum and aunt who were hidden by the nuns as children in Croatia and separated from their parents (my grandmother never to return, my grandfather to return but to leave his daughters with the nuns). Jeff Goldblum is Adam, a very popular cabaret and circus performer in Berlin who finds himself in a concentration camp with Nazi officer Willem Dafoe (who remembers his act and forces him to walk on all fours like a dog and live in a dog kennel with his German Shepherd). Adam is forced to ‘perform’ for Dafoe to keep him amused. In the meantime, his wife and one of his daughters passes him playing the violin on the way to the gas chamber. On liberation, Dafoe gives Adam a mansion belonging to a political opponent whose estate was confiscated by the Nazi’s to thank him for keeping him amused during the war years in the camp. It is while there that a former inmate visits Adam in the mansion to tell him his eldest daughter is alive, married and living in Haifa expecting her first child. The tragic discovery Adam makes when he visits Haifa is enough to tip him into madness and he ends up in a mental hospital in the Negev desert in Israel run by Derek Jacobi. It is only when Adam stops avoiding his issues that he finds the strength to be healed and finally released with the help of Jacobi and another child inmate who thinks he’s a feral dog. You have to be Jewish and have had family members who suffered irreparable psychological damage due to the holocaust (as in my family) to really understand this film. It’s a harrowing and moving film covering a topic that is often ignored. Most people think concentration camp inmates, upon liberation, lived happily ever after. The mental hospitals set up in Israel to deal with their traumas prove this was not so however these hospitals were only opened in the 1980s and not in the 1960s as in the film. Finally this taboo subject is covered with great sensitivity. I only wish my aunt and mother would recognise their psychological issues and seek counselling- they refuse to do so and are unaware that their behaviour is very hurtful to others. A tragic legacy of the holocaust.

Gave up after a while. We didn't have the stamina to stay with this movie. A serious enough subject but dfficult to stay focused.

I nust confess that I didn't watch the film all the way through, the main reason being that it didn't appear to be doing waht it said on the tin: I was expecting to see a film about a Jewish entertainer who was forced to amuse his Nazi captors by amusing them during his confinement in a concentration camp and then,after the War, he was sent to an asylum. I was prepared for a harrowing drama but not the impressionistic, stylised fare that was served. I found Jeff Goldblum totally unconvincig and reluctantly switched off. Having said all this, it would not surprise me if Adam Resurrected became something of a cult movie eventually and perhaps at that stage I may be pesuaded to give it another go.

What do you get if you mix Sophies Choce, Life is Beautiful, the one about the musicians playing while prisoners walked to the gas chambers and One flew over the cuckoos nest.

Answer, absolute over ripe tripe, it is impoosible to really care about the movie and the actors when the story seems to have been made by random plot points and a dialogue that seems to have been paid for by the word.

If it had all been on the tragedy during the war then it could have been a thoughtful interesting movie but trying to make it about some symbolic acts of redemption some years later just does not make sense. I saw Jeff Goldblum on stage last year and know that he can act a lot better than this tosh allows him to.

absolute rubbish why have these stars subjected themselves to this load of bull