The Adjustment Bureau would like to be a film about the nature of free will, and about our instinctive desire as human beings to break free of the boundaries imposed upon their lives. It would like to be a film about the power of true love. And it would also like to be one of those films that we always think about, even five or ten years later, whenever some happy random coincidence befalls us, or some chance misfortune prevents us from completing a task—we might chuckle to ourselves and imagine one of those grey-suited men from The Adjustment Bureau working invisibly behind the scenes to trip us up.In practice, though, The Adjustment Bureau for some reason never quite achieves that magical takeoff point where it becomes about anything more than itself. Matt Damon and Emily Blunt both deliver likable, naturalistic performances and they have an easy, comfortable chemistry with each other, but even so, their romance just doesn’t feel big enough to convince an audience that it’s worth rewriting the rules of the universe to make sure they get to be together. The particulars of their characters are just too odd—Damon is a rising young politician, a GQ cover boy who somehow is able to overcome the scandal of having gotten into a bar brawl after winning an election but not the scandal of having mooned someone while he was in college, years before ever entering politics. (Writer/director George Nolfi must have spent weeks trying to think of a political scandal for this character that would be big enough to ruin his career but not serious enough for the audience to stop liking him. He should have kept thinking.) And Blunt is a modern dancer with a small troupe in New York City that apparently doesn’t allow its audiences to sit in chairs during their performances, who is on the verge of becoming “the most famous dancer in America” and one of its leading choreographers.
Nolfi spends a lot of time huffing and puffing and telling us about the huge, significant careers these two people are destined to have, but he doesn’t seem at all interested in what those careers stand for—what is so groundbreaking about Blunt’s dancing? What ideas is she trying to express? We get the sense that Damon is a Democrat, but we don’t find out what his political beliefs are or why it would matter to the rest of us if he became president or not. I kind of wonder if this movie might have been more intriguing if it had drastically lowered its stakes—if Damon’s true destiny were to become a plumber or something, and Blunt a real estate agent, and that the Giant Cosmic Plan nevertheless depended on them never meeting and instead going to community colleges in different cities and making modest, unglamourous middle-class livings for themselves. Does the idea of someone being “meant” to become president really fire up anybody’s imagination?
Anyhow, Damon becoming president means a great deal to John Slattery and Anthony Mackie, operatives for a shadowy group of men (and it’s all men—this group is apparently exempt from equal-opportunity employment legislation) who silently observe all of humanity and occasionally step unobserved to make sure that things don’t deviate from a Plan designed by an unseen overseer nicknamed The Chairman. They’re not really evil guys—in fact, they might be angels. They’re morally neutral, just following orders from above and working in mysterious ways to save mankind from its worst impulses. They also have trouble seeing clearly around water, and they travel through New York via a series of wormholes disguised as doorways. But they can’t use the doorways if they’re not wearing their magical hats.
Yeah, yeah, magical hats. The whole mythology of the Adjustment Bureau feels very undercooked and cobbled-together, borrowed arbitrarily from the “afterlife bureaucracy” settings of Here Comes Mr. Jordan and A Matter of Life and Death, the soulful, overcoated angels of Wings of Desire, and especially the Observers from the TV show Fringe. I know, I know, the movie is based on a Philip K. Dick short story, but the subplot involving Anthony Mackie’s character—an Adjustment Bureaucrat who secretly works against his bosses to help Damon and Blunt escape their proscribed fates—owes a lot more to the much superior Season 2 Fringe episode “August.” You don’t feel the pieces of this movie snapping together in that satisfying way that the best fantasies do. This magical conceit of the Adjustment Bureau doesn’t resonate, it doesn’t feel pleasurably, instinctively “right” in the manner of, say, Jeff Daniels stepping off the movie screen in The Purple Rose of Cairo or the toys coming to life when their owners aren’t around in Toy Story or Christopher Reeve going back in time by clutching a pocket watch in Somewhere in Time or that Twilight Zone episode about the little girl falling out of bed and winding up lost inside another dimension. There was something about those movies’ premises, as silly as they might be, that you just got—the rules didn’t even need explanation. Not so with The Adjustment Bureau, which is simultaneously underimagined and overexplained—as when Nolfi has Mackie make a big, pointless to-do over how the magical doorknobs must be activated by turning them clockwise.
I like the old-fashioned romantic spirit behind the script of The Adjustment Bureau, but at the same time, I don’t understand why it came out onscreen looking so drab and grey. Even the big, climactic chase scene, with Damon and Blunt using the magical doorways to hop all over Manhattan as they run from the Bureau feels like it missed an easy opportunity to be much more funny and sly and stylish. (Or was Nolfi afraid of reminding audiences of the ending of Monsters Inc.?)
All the same, I’m pleased that The Adjustment Bureau seems to be making money. When I saw the trailer a few months ago, the movie looked so boring that I figured it was dead in the water. It’s nice to see that movies, and not just handsome young politicians and their modern dancer girlfriends, are sometimes able to escape their foreordained fates.
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