Love seems to have had it tough lately. Love's had Twilight, for fuck's sake. But things weren't always emo-vampires and women making choices between necrophillia or bestiality. One of the greatest romantic fantasies in cinema history, A Matter Of Life And Death (1946), was illuminated by an idea so simple and so beautiful that it makes your heart beat harder just to say it: that a single tear shed for love might stop heaven in its tracks.
More than 60 years later, and The Adjustment Bureau dons its fedora and aims for something just as special. That a kiss can change the course of your fate. And that true love will find a way.
Adapting Philip k. Dick’s short story Adjustment Team, with its neo-noir trappings and brain-twisting setup involving men in fedoras who orchestrate the actions of human beings as if they were lab rats, The Adjustment Bureau may remind some of Dark City, though it's less boldly stylized than that 1998 cult fave, let alone such visually extravagant Dick adaptations as Minority Report and A Scanner Darkly. Writer/producer/director George Nolfi’s genre-jumping mystery sells itself as a thriller but is in fact a surprisingly heartfelt romance.
David Norris (Matt Damon) is an up-and-coming politician running for a U.S. Senate seat from the state of New York. He's young and brash and, when his past catches up with him, he loses the election. He meets Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt) in his darkest hour, when he's preparing to give his conciliation speech. She inspires him but, like Cinderella, she vanishes without giving her name and he doesn't even have a glass slipper to fit to her feet. Three years later, on the morning when chance brings David and Elise back together, he learns of the existence of The Adjustment Bureau. After recognising that they have been observed, they capture David. The situation is explained to him and he is allowed to go free, but with two provisos: (1) He cannot tell anyone about the existence of The Adjustment Bureau - to do so would make him immediately subject to "resetting" (lobotomization), and (2) He cannot ever again see Elise. From that point, his life becomes an ongoing struggle to circumvent the obstacles placed in his path and be with Elise. The more successful he becomes, the more seriously his threat is regarded by The Adjustment Bureau, and eventually they bring in Thompson (Terence Stamp), "The Hammer," to resolve the situation.
With oscar-winning cinematographer John Toll brushing the mood between light and dark (the shifting weather seems to track Norris’ storming emotions and the uncertain heavenly shifts), Damon probably has as much running to do here as he did in any of the Bourne movies.
“We actually tried free will before,” rumbles Terence Stamp, the Bureau’s dark destroyer brought in to prevent Norris from disrupting destiny. “You gave us the Dark ages for five centuries.”
From theological metaphors to pre-determinist minefields, we’re on seriously tricky ground here. Nolfi asks some difficult, adult questions about life and choices. Between being a President or a husband. Between changing the world or settling down.
Maybe it’s simpler to accept breaking the laws of nature when it happens in a dream, like Inception, or in a computer network, like in The Matrix, but The Adjustment Bureau’s corporate hierarchy of a surprisingly incompetent bureaucracy endowed with mystical powers that its agents use to keep the world on track—right here under our noses—is a suspension of disbelief that eventually collapses.
Love seems to have had it tough lately. Love's had Twilight, for fuck's sake.
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