You’d think that Matt Damon, who plays American politician David Norris in The Adjustment Bureau and narrated last year’s Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job about the global financial meltdown of 2008, would know by now that it doesn’t matter who’s actually in office: it’s the system that stinks.
And in The Adjustment Bureau, the system is run by hat-wearing bureaucrats who manipulate chance, opportunity and people’s everyday lives with minor “adjustments” to ensure that everything goes “according to plan.”
Norris is a political wild card the kind of reckless guy who gets elected to the Lower House at a young age, then loses a Senatorial bid because old photos surface of him dropping trou at a college frat. (Really? That’s enough for somebody not to get elected these days?) But when he accidentally meets up with Elise (Emily Blunt), a freewheeling modern dancer (as opposed to the tight-bunned ballet dancer that Natalie Portman played in Black Swan), on a bus, all hell breaks loose. Or rather, the plans initiated by an offscreen presence known as The Chairman come undone. And Norris has to choose between free will and someone else’s destiny.
The Adjustment Bureau is kind of a low-rent Inception, and it deserves points for at least bringing a new storyline to Hollywood in a summer dominated by sequels, prequels, spinoffs and toy brand movies (Transformers 3, anyone?). But of course, the story’s not new at all: it’s based on a Philip K. Dick tale called “Adjustment Team.” (Dick continues to be the source of countless sci-fi monkey wrenches thrown into the Hollywood machinery, despite being dead almost three decades. Blade Runner was just the start.)
It also deserves points for steering in the direction of romance, instead of straight sci-fi. One might think, from the movie trailer, that this is another origami-city mind-bender like Inception, but it’s actually trying to wear its heart on its sleeve. The Bureau agents are sinister at first (particularly a character played by Terence Stamp known as The Hammer), but some of them, it’s hinted, are more like angels in disguise. They do on occasion threaten to “recalibrate” the brains of those who stumble upon too much knowledge about the way the world is actually run (sort of a high-tech lobotomy), but usually they operate in such a stumblebum fashion that the movie threatens to turn into a comedy at any moment.
It turns out that The Chairman’s “plan” allows David and Elise to initially meet, but several hat-wearing Bureau agents (including Mad Men regular John Slattery) believe their romance must be broken off because Norris has a bigger political fate in store the presidency and dallying with modern dancer Elise would sidetrack his political ambitions.
The movie plays around with a kind of ‘50s look and style. The Bureau agents can traverse space and time by slipping through strategically placed doorways in Manhattan but only if they wear anachronistic Fedoras when doing so. In this, it suggests the noir atmosphere of Dark City and Blade Runner, but director George Nolfi has something else in mind: a romance in which the protagonists must choose between what they believe their fate is and what feels right.
It almost works. Damon and Blunt have some sparks onscreen, especially when first seen flirting in a political headquarters men’s room. Most of the time they maintain a kind of low-simmer “fake” chemistry, until the stakes are significantly raised when they must flee the Bureau agents hand in hand through a series of portals that land them in Shea Stadium, Ellis Island, MoMA and other New York City landmarks. This is where the Inception connection can be made an in-folding world that isn’t what it seems but ultimately, it’s not a very apt comparison.
There are bits that remind one of Dark City, in which the planet is rearranged on a nightly basis by mysterious alien forces; and something of Serendipity, that rom-com in which the separated couple irritatingly neglect to give out each other’s names or phone numbers; there’s also a reference to The Graduate when David, after dumping Elise three years hence (so that his fate would not hamper her dancing career), decides he must track her down again just as she is about to wed someone else. Rather than beating on the glass doors and yelling “Elise! Elise!” in annoying Dustin Hoffman fashion, he corners her in yet another bathroom, drags her away through a side door, and the couple realize they have an important decision to make that could effect the outcome of history.
In this, The Adjustment Bureau starts to resemble a cosmic version of the ‘70s game show Let’s Make a Deal, in which host Monty Hall would coax contestants to guess where the “big prize” was behind Door Number 1, Door Number 2, or Door Number 3. Damon and Blunt keep opening so many doors, you kind of expect them to end up in another movie. What’s at stake is not a new car or a luxury cruise, but the fate of mankind, since, as The Hammer patiently explains, every time the Bureau has stepped back in the past and allowed free will to run its course, things got royally f-ed up. First there were the Dark Ages after the fall of the Roman Empire (the Bureau finally stepped in after that hellish patch by engineering the Renaissance and Age of Enlightenment); then the Bureau took a step back in 1910, and saw a century wracked by two World Wars, the Great Depression, the Holocaust, and the threat of nuclear annihilation up to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Really, is this any way to run a planet? Maybe it’s time for Plan B.
Of course, the big question is, who actually runs the Adjustment Bureau? Is it God, or some ancient alien race pulling the strings of human destiny? Director Nolfi leaves that question open to debate, with arguments on either side. The Bureau agents tote around high-tech books with blinking schematic designs charting each person’s destiny, but in the end, The Adjustment Bureau opts for the human touch, suggesting that the Book of Love may have been written long ago, full of “long and boring bits” and “instructions for dancing” as the Magnetic Fields song goes, but it’s still open to revision along the way.