The Adjustment Bureau: Free Will Takes a Backseat

Matt Damon's new thriller The Adjustment Bureau, presents a world where what seems like chance is all part of the (master) plan.

A cute girl (or guy) willingly gives you their phone number or email at the club on Friday night.  Then you call them the next week and they hang up on you; then they accuse you of stalking them if you call or IM them back.  The hand-shaking man who was all set to hire you on Monday tells you on Friday that corporate changed their mind.  The business deal that you thought was a sure thing falls apart at the last minute.  The friend you planned that vacation with for months suddenly gets in a car accident or has the flu or their Aunt Martha gets sick, and you're left alone.

We've all had those moments, and some of us more often than could ever seem logically explicable.  Coincidence? we wonder.  Or not.

That's the stock in trade of Matt Damon's new movie The Adjustment Bureau, a thriller (written and directed by George Nolfi) that is perhaps the strongest entry in this month's cinematic sci-fi "space race", which also sees the similar-feeling Limitless, starring Bradley Cooper and Robert DeNiro, and the new alien-stoner Comic-Con comedy Paul. (It would also make a good double feature with a DVD of the considerably darker Inception, reviewed here by FF’s Noah Kristula-Green.)  Or for that matter, Damon's previous supernatural-themed thriller, Hereafter.

The film tells the story of young "bad boy" senatorial aspirant David Norris, who unexpectedly loses his first campaign to move from Congress to the upper chamber.  (The movie is replete with cameos and quickies from real-life political A-listers including Wesley Clark, Madeleine Albright, Terry McAuliffe, and Jon Stewart -- it doesn't leave much ambiguity as to which party's team Norris is playing on.)  He also meets a ballerina and aspiring choreographer Elise Sallas (the luminous Emily Blunt) in the unlikely venue of a men's room (no, it's not as crude as it sounds) just before giving his concession speech.  The two are instantly stricken with each other, and the newfound hope of meeting Elise gives the defeated candidate the va-va-voom to give a home-run speech that reanimates his all-but-dead political career.

But something, or someone, doesn't want David and Elise to stay together, and will stop at almost nothing to see that they're kept apart.  And we're not just talking the FBI or the CIA, "Friend-o" -- we're talking The Man Upstairs, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof.  There is an army of supernatural "operatives" who are out to adjust Damon's (and all of our) frequencies.  Yet though they dress and walk and talk like 1960s G-men (including the memorable John Slattery, in full Mad Men trenchcoat-and-fedora regalia), and these "operatives" do behave in a distinctly sinister fashion, that isn't the film's point.

Indeed, The Adjustment Bureau is the latest contestant in Hollywood's tight competition for Most Misleading Ad Campaign. The movie's trailers and TV ads promise breakneck chills and thrills-a-minute, and suggest the atmosphere of a late Vietnam/Watergate era paranoia thriller like The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor, or The Conversation. But while there is suspense and high drama, Adjustment is actually an existential romance in disguise, with more in common with Wings of Desire than Blade Runner. Instead of being after Damon and his girlfriend in pursuit of top-secrets or averting nuclear war or terrorism or grand DaVinci Code type conspiracies, the "operatives" simply want to ensure that each character lives up (or down) to their pre-determined destinies.

That isn't to say that lives aren't at stake, however.  In one scene, the most sympathetic operative (The Hurt Locker's Anthony Mackie) guiltily admits to Damon that Damon's father (who died a broken man) and brother (who committed suicide by overdose) were smart, capable men who "could have been great... but it went against The Plan."  Left unsaid, but clearly implied, was the idea that it had been this operative's "job" to thwart the two of them and trump-card them at every turn, so that they wouldn't achieve the success that would disrupt The Plan and its ripple effects -- success that would have otherwise been a fait accompli without this not-so-"divine" intervention.  (The movie's source material came from a Philip K. Dick novel, and it should be noted that Dick, who died in 1982, was a talented cult writer who by all accounts should have achieved far more fame and financial success than he did in his rather sad, and yes, thwarted short life.)

So which is more troubling (or comforting) to contemplate?  The idea of God (or "The Chairman") as puppet-master, brute-forcing you into whatever pattern He wants for his ant farm, with little more regard for your own personal feelings and wants than a dog or cat at the animal lab or county shelter?  Or that it's all just random chance, that it all means nothing, that there is no overarching spiritual force or destiny?  That our lives' trajectories are at one with bumper cars at the fairgrounds, or a falling Plinko chip on The Price is Right.

This is where the movie can't help but cop out a little, and somewhat undercuts its own conclusions.  I won't spoil it for you, but one does get the feeling that some parts of the ending came from studio focus groups or pre-emptive narrative strikes, to make the movie "safer"; to leave viewers stirred, but not shaken.   Still, The Adjustment Bureau does manage to wrap things up on a basically life-affirming note.  And you don't have to enter an alternate reality to see it as a comment and metaphor for an all-too-ominous reality where uncertainty seems to hang over us like a ghost shadow, where we don't even feel safe in our own jobs, bank accounts, and homes.

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