The Adjustment Bureau is a movie about angels and fate and politics and sharp suits and magic hats and water and Emily Blunt's pouting lips. Shit happens, then the credits roll. That's it.
I honestly don't have a great deal to say about the film. It was entertaining. I was certainly never bored. I'd go so far as to say I enjoyed the experience. But it just seems ultimately ineffectual. Cool concepts, fine acting, and subtle, non-flashy direction all come together to make a good, if not terribly memorable motion picture.
Here's the story: Matt Damon is a young and hip politician running for a New York Senate seat. His 2006 campaign falls apart because the New York Post publishes photos of Damon mooning his pals at a college reunion. Seriously, that nearly destroys his political career. His character became popular because he was a young dude. A cool, brash fellow that got into a bar fight the day after he won a seat in the House of Representatives (or maybe it was the state senate. the details evade me). What's so damning about goofing around with your pals at a reunion? Why does that insignificant bullshit sink his campaign? I don't get it.
As he prepares his concession speech, he sequesters himself in a public restroom to go over his notes. Emily Blunt is hiding in one of the stalls, and overhears Damon's mouth noise. She's some kind of free spirit, because she's hiding out from hotel security (I think they're in a hotel. Once again, the details...) because she crashed a wedding, or some shit. The two flirt, and she advises the man she instantly fell in love with to relax and speak from the heart. Then the two part ways.
Damon ends up shooting from the hip during his concession speech, reminding the brain-dead voters why they fell in love with him in the first place. This makes the man a clear favorite for the 2010 Senate race. Damon and Blunt don't see each other again for 4 years, when the run into each other on a city bus. You know all of this. You've seen the trailers. It's no fucking secret.
Damon and Blunt are very much in love. They want to be together, but the mysterious "Adjustment Bureau" is out to foil their love connection, because it interferes with their grand design. These company men are following a plan set in motion by their Chairmen, and their plan for Damon involves getting his ass behind that awesome desk in the Oval Office. And if Damon sticks with Emily Blunt, then his political edge will be Blunt-ed (heh, heh) because he'll no longer have that fire in his belly. If Matt Damon and his true love stick together, he just won't be the President that the Bureau needs. So they meddle like meddlesome meddlers, sabotaging the lovebirds at every turn.
We have the obligatory confrontation between Damon and the Bureau boys, where they attempt to explain the grand design and his place in it. They threaten him with a brain-wipe if he doesn't do as he's told. They call in General Zod to intimidate Will Hunting with his icy stare. But none of their tactics work. Because Matt Damon is in love, dammit! And love conquers all!
That's a spoiler alert, by the way. Love does indeed conquer all in The Adjustment Bureau.
The film makes no attempt to build any mystery as to the true nature of the titular Bureau. They're well dressed angels, and they're following God's plan. They all walk around carrying neat little journals filled with the ever-changing blueprints of their charges. They can travel in style using a series of doors linked through sub-space (?) which they can access thanks to their magic hats. And, like the aliens in Signs, they don't like water. It fucks with their cosmic GPS.
The trailer makes the Bureau look like the villains of the picture. But they're really not. Sure, in some vague sense they are the bad guys because they're trying to keep our protagonists apart. But they're following God's plan. And God isn't a bad guy, right? On top of that, some of our office angels learn that in several prior iterations of the plan, Damon and Blunt were meant to be together. Only recently did the plan change to eliminate Emily Blunt from Matt Damon's life. So these two can't be blamed for their mutual attraction, because they were destined for each other before the big plan arbitrarily changed.
None of the Bureau dudes are villains. When the lovey dovey situation gets out of hand, the angels call in the big gun: Terence Stamp. He's so badass that the other angels call him "the hammer". So when he comes down from his cloud, some shit's gonna go down, right? Nope. He just talks to Matt Damon, like the others. Only he talks with a dash of grandfatherly menace. Predictably, this does nothing to sway Damon from his mission to go steady with Emily Blunt.
We're meant to worry about Matt Damon, with the constant threat of his mind being erased for resisting his destiny. But none of the angels seem very eager to do that. The threat has no teeth. Don't get me wrong, Dear Imaginary Reader. I'm not complaining. I was actually pleasantly surprised to learn that there were no true villains in the story. They're angels, after all. They're just trying to keep the human race from annihilating itself.
We learn that the first time the Bureau took a step back and allowed mankind to write their own ticket we fell into The Fucking Dark Ages. The second time they gave us the reigns we produced two World Wars, the Cuban missle crisis, and Leave It To Beaver. These guys aren't going to let us fuck it up again. The Adjustment Bureau is only looking out for us, man! You can make all the arguments against predestination that you want, but in the world of The Adjustment Bureau, it's pretty clear that if we're completely in charge of our own fate, we'll just blow ourselves up.
So our angelic friends aren't villains. At worst, they're benevolent douchebags. They mean well, but your feelings don't really enter into the picture. To these guys, it's really just a job. Even to General Zod. The climax of the film involves a wild chase through the city via the Bureau's network of magic doors. Matt Damon tracks down Emily Blunt, then the pair spend the next five minutes evading the Bureau goons dashing through random doors, eventually winding up at Ellis Island.
At this point, Damon gets the wild idea to travel to Bureau HQ and give the Chairman a piece of his mind. So using the convenient "counterclockwise turn" technique on a nearby doorknob, they immediately access HQ and begin a mad dash through the building in search of this enigmatic Chairman.
It was during this sequence that I wondered what Damon's plan was prior to choosing to confront the Chairman. I honestly have no clue what the man intended to do before this. I mean, there's literally no way they could evade the Bureau for more than a few minutes. These guys are all over the world and can sense your presence several miles away. What the fuck was Damon going to do, find some deserted, doorless island and live out the rest of his existence cracking coconuts on a rock with his girlfriend? It doesn't make any sense.
Our protagonists don't find the Chairman. But they do find General Zod, who tells them that it's the end of the road, and that the lovebirds are screwed. He doesn't manage to sound menacing, or anything. He just kinda tells them this. Five seconds later, Sgt. Sandborn from The Hurt Locker shows up with a letter from the Chairman informing General Zod that the plan has changed once more, and Damon can keep his British armcandy. Then Zod just shrugs and disappears.
That's it. Sandborn sticks around for a few minutes to tell our heroes the good news, then the movie ends. Matt Damon and Emily Blunt have proven to God Himself that their love truly was meant to be, and so He gave them a pass. No harm done.
This movie has no bite. There's never any attempt to build tension in the narrative. Matt Damon loves Emily Blunt. Emily Blunt loves Matt Damon. The angels say that they're not allowed to love each other. Matt Damon non-violently refuses to give up on their love. And eventually God gives their relationship the thumbs-up. That's it, man. There's nothing else there. On paper, it sounds okay. He loves her so much that he gives fate the finger and pursues his heart, damn the consequences. But the end result is curiously inert.
The film is very loosely based on a Philip K. Dick story called Adjustment Team. I say "loosely" because the original story has essentially nothing to do with the film aside from the basic premise of shadowy figures controlling fate. The story is very atmospheric and disturbing. When the protagonst, Ed Fletcher, stumbles across an Adjustment Team at work in his office building, the entire location is in a state of flux. The building itself is a crumbling facade, his co-workers are ashen statues, and the sky is a grey void. He escapes and tells his wife what he just saw, and she convinces him to go back to work, to prove to himself that what he saw was some kind of hallucination.
When Fletcher does return, he sees that everything has changed. From small details, like different-colored window blinds, larger desks, different pictures arranged in cubicles, to very large changes, like his boss being altered into a thinner, more youthful version of himself. On the cusp of a complete breakdown, Fletcher is summoned via phone booth to see The Old Man, this story's version of God.
The Old Man informs Fletcher that his "sector" of the city was being adjusted in order to facilitate a land purchase in Canada. There are certain "anthropological remains" at the site that will be uncovered, and this discovery will set off a chain of events that will change the entire world. Fletcher was supposed to be at work before the adjustment started, but because a lazy "summoner" canine barked at the wrong moment, he was detained at home, entertaining a life insurance salesman for over an hour, making him late for work.
Fletcher promises to keep his mouth shut, telling The Old Man that he'll convince his wife that his previous story was a delusion, brought about by heavy stress at work. The Old Man allows Fletcher to return unmolested, with a few parting remarks. If Fletcher is unable to convince his wife that his "grey world" story was untrue, when he eventually dies he will stand before The Old Man once again. And on that day Fletcher's fate will not be "enviable".
He's being threatened with eternal damnation if he fucks up! That's a real threat. And The Old Man isn't fooling around with this guy. If something goes wrong and this parcel of land is not purchased, the consequences could doom the entire world. High stakes. Tension. Atmosphere. This very short story has these things. The feature film has none of these things.
I'm not trying to pile hate on the movie. As I said earlier, I did enjoy it. I was just expecting more. The performances are all good. I have no complaints there. Damon and Blunt are fine in their roles. I loved John Slattery as "Richardson", the vaguely antagonistic Bureau man, until he abruptly disappeared after the film's second act. And I also liked Anthony Mack, playing the role originated by a talking dog in Dick's story as "Harry", the angel whose initial fuck-up creates the film's main conflict.
He's rather morose, because he feels like Matt Damon's already had plenty of bad luck, what with the tragic deaths of his beloved parents when he was a young man. In the end, he provides Damon with the knowledge (and the magic hat) to use the city's many doors to find his girl and evade the Bureau. Mackie just has a natural likeability. I also liked his portrayal of Tupac Shakur in Notorious, but that's neither here nor there.
In the end, The Adjustment Bureau is a fine distraction, I suppose, but it's nothing special. I'll probably never watch it again, but I don't regret seeing it. It was a pleasant diversion on a Sunday afternoon, and sometimes that's good enough.
P.S. - A review of Battle: Los Angeles may be in the works. isn't that exciting?!
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