The Adjustment Bureau (2011)

You can’t beat a good Dick movie. Regular readers will appreciate that I love a good Dick film, in fact one of my all time favourites movies is almost certainly the greatest translation of Dick on-screen. I enjoyed Ahnoldt’s Dick movie, on the flip-side I didn’t particularly enjoy Peter Weller’s appearance in a Dick. Keanu Reeves Dick film was one of the best Dicks of recent times, and in my estimation it was better than the Tom Cruise Dick movie although I would concede that that was one of the more exciting recent films to be culled from a Dick. When I first saw the trailer for this particular Dick film I immediately thought of Rod, specifically this Rod which has always stuck in my mind since I saw it back in the late eighties, the imagery of those blue hued creatures assembling reality has built quite the cultish fan-base over the past couple of decades. Yesterday I saw the latest addition to the Dick movie canon and although the Dick in this instance has been somewhat diluted – Blunted even – as Dick films go this was still an enjoyable ride, a film which moderates one of the central philosophies of Dick to make it more palatable to the masses.

 In The Adjustment Bureau, based on a short story with the slightly less catchy title of Adjustment Team a rising young senator named David Norris (Matt Damon) is about to find his life and understanding of reality inverted. Storming ahead in the polls during his fight to become the youngest ever elected official to the House of Representatives a youthful indiscretion hits the press and his campaign is fatally wounded. Retiring to the mens restroom whilst preparing to deliver his resignation speech David collides with the vivacious Elise (Emily Blunt) and the sparks begin to fly as the orphaned and siblingless David finally meets a kindred spirit whom ignites an incendiary passion in his otherwise career focused existence. Elise cautiously provides David with her number and makes a graceful exit before things start to turn strange, soon a group fedora clad ‘case officers’ kidnap him and explain that this chance meeting was not meant to be and the fates have an alternate path in store for our plucky young protagonist. With their unusual spectral powers this mysterious organisation attempts to thwart David’s noble attempts to resume his embryonic romance, when his agile activities supersede their obstructions they promote the case to a more sinister superior, reallocating their task to the malefic Agent Thompson (Terrence Stamp), and the stakes accelerate from mere heartbreak to a potentially sanity threatening fate.

The Adjustment Bureau is essentially a romantic thriller written by David Icke or any other conspiracy theorist of your choice, a successful blend of alternate reality brain scrambler and conundrum chivalry that is far more successful than its uncertain trailer suggests. Crucially Damon and Blunt fructify a convincing relationship in a few scant character scenes between each other, these films live or die by their on-screen chemistry and I for one was convinced that our hero would risk his career and sanity for his love at first sight. Screenwriter turned debut director George Nolfi cloaks some philosophical questions amongst the surface SF thriller histrionics – do we operate with free will? What is destiny? Can any higher power justify its interventions in the lives and decisions of us mere mortals? – with some adequate chasing and running montages to subjugate these cognitive distractions into the mêlée. The film is handsomely photographed by the capable John Toll (The Thin Red Line, Vanilla Sky) and yes the vertical and horizontal visual alignments of corporate New York do remind one of the rotating and collapsing mise-en-scene of Nolan’s recent triumph, but this film is much more gentle and modest in its intentions, where Inception seemed to be aiming for the epic The Adjustment Bureau is happy to concede with the intimate. It swiftly builds the mythology of its universe – the qualities of the hats, the modest deployment of SFX with some dimensional tampering teleportation, a vision of a spiritual realm structured around a distinguished Manhattan legal practice – all of which reinforces an infectious suspicion of the executive class that is increasingly prevalent in Hollywood cinema. If you accept the sanity vaporizing revelations that both David and Elise suffer during the films final act then you’ll enjoy this movie, the film has a neat and appropriate climax which should satisfy both genders. If Wings Of Desire hooked up with A Matter of Life and Death then this may be their offspring – all in all not a bad for a Dick*.

*It’s hard to believe but I’m approaching forty years of age yet can be so juvenile isn’t it?. And the Icke and Loose Change links are for interest only, those dudes are mentalists. But watch that Arena documentary, it’s my attempt to apologise.