The “disturbing, provocative, and occasionally horrible” performance Jeff Goldblum called his best
These days, Jeff Goldblum seems content to play himself in almost everything, capitalising on his status as Hollywood’s favourite eccentric uncle to coast through a string of movies and TV shows that don’t ask him to do anything other than act as unnaturally natural as he does when the cameras aren’t rolling.
There’s even a technical term for it, albeit coined by the man himself, with Goldblum admitting that he’s either asked or takes it upon himself to “Jeff it up” when he receives a script or rehearses a scene. There’s a time and a place for the actor’s signature shenanigans, and it can’t be a coincidence that when he didn’t Jeff it up in the slightest, he gave the best performance of his career.
It would be wrong to say that he isn’t a good actor, but it also wouldn’t be incorrect to suggest that he’s become more of a meme than a performer. It helps that his inherent oddness saw him fit seamlessly into Wes Anderson’s repertory, but when he drops the schtick and puts his game face on, Goldblum remains perfectly capable of reminding everyone that he can be a solid pair of dramatic hands with the right material.
Unfortunately, the performance he considers the greatest he’s ever given didn’t come in a particularly well-received movie. His central turn was singled out for praise, but Paul Schrader’s 2008 literary adaptation, Adam Resurrected, was the recipient of a muted response from critics and barely had a cinema release to speak of. Still, despite its failures, Goldblum was happy to pat himself on the back.
“I’ve looked for challenges all my acting life,” he told Parade. “But this went beyond anything that I’ve ever done.” The star’s title character, Adam Stein, was one of Germany’s most popular comedians before World War II, and after being sent to a concentration camp, his reputation ensured his survival at a cost, with a Nazi officer routinely humiliating him and forcing him to perform routines.
Unfolding through flashbacks, Adam Resurrected opens with the titular Holocaust survivor in a psychiatric institution in the early 1960s, where he’s haunted by memories of his wartime experience, survivor’s guilt, and delusions of being a dog after spending years being treated as the ‘pet’ of the man who kept him alive, but at a great personal cost.
“Playing Adam was disturbing, provocative, inspirational, emotional, and occasionally horrible,” Goldblum continued. “When I’m acting, I’m usually pretending. I don’t get drunk to play a drunk. But I couldn’t escape that way this time. I knew I was going to have to suffer, but not in a way like the unimaginable things that people really went through during the Holocaust.”
He became so immersed in his performance that “for the better part of three months when we were filming, I was a wreck going around crying every day.” The downside is that not many people ever got around to seeing the film, and it wasn’t lavished in the sort of praise these types of prestige pictures usually generate. For Goldblum, though, “it was life-changing.”
