The Adjustment Bureau (****)

Directed by: George Nolfi

Starring: Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, Anthony Mackie, John Slattery, Michael Kelly, Terence Stamp

Seen: June 10^th 2011

**** Out of ****

I go to the movies in the hope of seeing good stories presented in interesting and inventive ways, and this happens often enough. But at rare intervals a movie also includes another thing: a strong, lasting idea, a thought that stays with you for its life-changing capability. The Adjustment Bureau is, to me, one of those movies.

David Norris (Damon) is a promising upcoming politician, the youngest yet in the position he holds. Opponents find something embarrassing though, causing his constituents to lose faith, and suddenly he loses a Senate election he was leading. Rehearsing his concession speech in a bathroom, he meets a woman, Elise(Blunt), hiding there from hotel security after crashing a wedding. The two immediately spark, they kiss, and this inspires David to adapt his speech – putting him back in the voters’ graces and setting him up for an almost perfect run in the next elections.

As the movie progresses, the Adjustment Bureau’s agents are slowly introduced. At first they are mysterious onlookers, and what they discuss seems strange: “David has to spill the coffee on his shirt by seven-oh-five AM”. In time the onlookers’ apparent power is revealed, as they can move objects by telepathy and thus influence patterns people live by. Harry (Mackie), one of these grey suit-wearing hat-sporting men, falls asleep and misses David, who gets on a bus, coffee not spilt, just after 07:05. He meets Elise on the bus and after some great romantic banter gets her number, Harry running behind the bus in desperation – the two should never have seen each other again.

The Adjustment Bureau’s job is to ensure that things happen according to plan, and this hiccup in Harry’s execution has the Bureau scrambling, the higher up company man Richardson (Slattery) called in to ensure that David and Elise do not come together. David is adamant in his quest and when he accidentally discovers the Bureau doing what they do, he tells them plain and simple that he won’t give up on Elise. The Bureau are certain about how they believe things should pan out, and the stakes are upped for David if he ever wants to be with Elise – he has to really go for it like no-one before. As David’s stubborn persistence continues, the Bureau assigns more influential agents to the case, going right up to Thompson (Stamp), who poses a real threat to David’s romantic ambitions.

Throughout the movie the pace slowly increases, resulting in nearly heart-stopping tension and chases at the movie’s climax. Damon is brilliant as the politician willing to risk everything for the girl, and Blunt is equally fantastic as the beautiful temptress struggling to understand the bigger picture with the small amount of information she’s presented with. This is science fiction, but only as background to a fantastic love story. The movie poses some deep questions around predestination and free will in constant battle, with predestination seeming the stronger one, the villain. In our lives, do we just follow “The Plan”, as laid out by generations before us, or do we actually allow free will to guide us towards something infinitely better, even if the mathematics behind it, the cold logic behind it, might not agree? The movie makes a bold statement, one that really had an impact on me: “Free will is a gift you never know how to use until you fight for it”, and man, what a fight this movie puts up to make you think about it in your life every time you remember the movie, even if only for a while, just until you spill a coffee on your shirt…