An attitude adjustment: movie review

Review: The Adjustment Bureau

I went to see The Adjustment Bureau the other night. The trailers looked interesting, and I was in the mood for a movie due to a recent setback.

It was worth it. The flick was a very clever variation of what you could call “a glimpse of the scenery behind the world” plot, loosely based on a short story by Phillip K. Dick.

Seeing it had the odd effect of convincing me my “destiny” was on the right track after all, after I’d had an experience that made me fear it had derailed. Precisely the kind of thing that would have occurred to PKD.

Rough plot outline: Senatorial candidate David Norris (Matt Damon – adequate) looks like he’s about to win the election when pics surface of him mooning some friends at a class reunion. He get’s creamed.

While hiding out in the Men’s room rehearsing his concession speech, he meets Elise (Emily Blunt – spectacular) who is hiding out because she’s a quirky prankster and has just crashed a fancy wedding. Banter follows, a connection is made, they kiss passionately on impulse.

He goes out to make a spontaneous speech in which he (gasp!) tells the truth about campaigning, focus groups, consultants, and the petty lies politicians tell to get liked. The kind of thing that would win a politician the undying loyalty of a great many people, if only they knew.

Things get seriously weird after this. He’s on his way to work at his new job, and a guy sitting in the park receives a phone call telling him Norris “has to spill coffee on his shirt at 7:05 a.m.”

The guy misses it, and Norris boards the bus to meet – Elise. You then find out the guy in the park has telekinetic powers as he flicks his finger and spills the coffee Norris is holding.

Norris gets Elise’s phone number. But then because he’s early to the office, he stumbles onto an eerie scene in which everybody is frozen and mysterious characters dressed like riot police are doing stuff to his buddy’s head with odd machines.

That’s the glimpse behind the scenery of the world. He runs, they catch him, they explain. They were causing a minor opinion change in his bud. And it was easy to catch him because they have a trick of opening a door – into another place.

Oh and by the way, he can’t be with Elise. Not ever again. So they take the number. They’ve got other plans for him.

The rest of the movie concerns his struggle with the agents of “the Adjustment Bureau” to find and connect with Elise in spite of all they can do.

Who are they? We don’t know. They’re not omnipotent and do have limitations Norris can exploit. They guide history for example, but they can’t rewrite it.

He asks one who’s favorably disposed to him, “Are you angels?”

“We’ve been called that,” is the enigmatic reply.

The only explanation he gets are from the favorably disposed agent, and Thompson, the heavy hitter nicknamed “the Hammer” (Terrence Stamp – magnificent) who’s called back to field work especially to take care of this.

Thompson explains They guided humanity out of the caves until the Roman Empire when they tried letting us control our own destiny – followed by five centuries of the Dark Ages.

They took control again and created the Renaissance, and tried giving us control again at the beginning of the 20th century.

“The result was World War I, World War II, the rise of Fascism…” you get the picture.

Plot continues with boy loses girl, boy finds girl again, etc with rolicking action and a teleportation chase scene skillfully interpolated with an emotional reconnect and a conclusion I won’t reveal.

It ends on a narrative reflection which evoked an eerie sense of synchonicity in me, because I’d been discussing the idea a very short time before. Maybe free will is our heritage, but it doesn’t come to us automatically. We have to fight for it, earn it.

All very good, I’m glad I went to the movie and I’m urging my wife to see it.

Now here’s what jarred me, in a very PDK kind of way. Dick took the idea that what we think is reality is really someone else’s construct very seriously. Partly because he very seriously took a lot of drugs, and partly because he had some serious brain malfunctions which caused him to have some interesting hallucinations (or religious experiences, take your pick) and eventually killed him.

When you see the film, note when Thompson is relating everything that went wrong in the 20th century, there is not one word about communism and the estimated 100 million murders committed by its adherents in that bloodiest of centuries.

To anybody who knew the first thing about history, that should be the culmination of the list. But it’s been airbrushed out of the historical record. Almost like powerful beings who can freeze us long enough to perform minor mental adjustments have…

See what I mean?

This entry was posted in Movies. Bookmark the permalink.

2 Responses to An attitude adjustment: movie review

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *