Adam Resurrected

I have spent so much time arguing for Paul Schrader’s place in the pantheon, it’s difficult to come to terms with a catastrophe like Adam Resurrected. The 2008 drama isn’t even a qualified failure like Schrader’s Forever Mine or The Walker, where you glimpsed enough inspiration beneath the dreck to make you wish his producers had let him off the leash. Based on a novel by Yoram Kaniuk, Adam Resurrected stars a nattering Jeff Goldblum as Adam Stein, a semi-famous clown/mind reader who disgraced himself in order to survive the Holocaust. Decades later, he’s a drunken sociopath wandering freely around an Israeli insane asylum, whose inhabitants worship him as a savior. A complete mess from beginning to end, the film even steals a crucial scene from Schrader’s own screenplay for The Last Temptation of Christ for its climax.