Friday Film Reflection: A Failure to Adjust
The Adjustment Bureau begins as a promising political drama about a young ambitious, but scandal-prone congressman publicly owning up to his own inauthenticity. David Norris (Matt Damon) looks poised to become a U.S. Senator, but when pictures of him mooning people at a party surface, he drops in the polls quicker than Herman Cain. A seemingly chance encounter with Elise (Emily Blunt), an incredibly talented ballerina, redirects his attention and even his lifelong ambition. He loses her number and obsesses for years about finding her again.
Enter the Adjustment Bureau, a group of hat-wearing professionals who turn out to be more or less angels. They’re intent on keeping David and Elise apart because their being together goes against “the plan.” When one of the angelic adjusters fails to make an “adjustment” on time—using his mind to spill David’s coffee at a precise moment—David walks in on them while they’re in the process of adjusting his colleague’s manner of reasoning. Everyone in the office where David works has frozen in time. Hat-wearing dudes seem to be conducting non-invasive brain surgery on David’s best friend.
The adjustment bureaucrats come clean with David, but warn him to keep what he’s seen and learned a secret. They also forbid him from seeing Elise, telling him that if the two of them get together, neither of them will fulfill their grand rolls in the plan. David’s world is turned upside down. Except it isn’t, and that’s the main problem with The Adjustment Bureau.
David’s new knowledge adds something new to his world, but it doesn’t fundamentally change it. He reenters politics and continues, despite the dangers, to pursue Elise. He has to contend with the otherworldly hat-wearers, but that’s about the only adjustment the story has him make. The realization of the Adjustment Bureau and the official divine plan should result in an entire reinterpretation of reality because it changes the meaning of everything, but nothing of the sort happens. At the most, we get the film dialogue version of lip service to questions of free will, when instead we should get a “new world,” a fundamental reinterpretation of the human condition like we saw in The Matrix and Dark City.
Because The Adjustment Bureau treats the adjusters as an “add-on” to reality, the film feels like two separate movies: first, the story of David and Elise having to decide whether their love is worth the consequences it may have for their professional dreams and goals, and second, the fantastical thriller of David running, wearing a hat, holding on to Elise, and inspiring God. Both stories are interesting on their own, but they never come together. A little adjusting by the filmmakers could have solved this.
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There are four things I would have to bring to the discussion to explain my own view of the film.
First, the film is really its own thing. It is based upon premises in PKD’s “The Adjustment Team” and his own understanding that time itself was being rewritten as God (or Sophia, or Zebra) played with time and saw what happened with each possibility. The original short story is quite different though one can certainly see how it inspired the longer story.
Second, though the movie is its own thing, I think it falls under the better side of PKD movie adaptations (Blade Runner, Minority Report, Adjustment Bureau, Scanner Darkly being the four best I’ve seen). I think the film ends positively and properly.
Third, why do I think this? Because it shows the way providence works with human free will. Providence without the human co-operation and co-development becomes determinism. Free will is intended to work with and co-develop providence — like Tolkien’s myth of the creation of the world, so too, we are a part of the symphony which develops world history. It shows that the changes might be minute, in world history, but great and meaningful to the ones who have them happen in their life due to their freedom. This is what is important — both are possible all in one. We might have the same “outline” but the meaning, the value changes for us depending upon what we do with it, how we work it out.
Fourth, and lastly, I like how the film seems to borrow from PKD’s later thought in dealing with an earlier story. Yes, it might seem, in the end, to be simplistic — and yet the appearance and the reality differ. When we try to see the ending in the simplistic fashion, we become like those who were forcing the way they saw providence. The ending is much more open-ended than that, and liable for more changes because of it.
Interesting, we might have to see it. I was glad to hear Henry’s take that “…it shows the way providence works with human free will.” Years ago I read Isaac Asimov’s “The End of Eternity” which dealt with a theme of outsider manipulation of people’s destinies. It drove me nuts (admittedly not a hard task), because it seemed at times that people had no free will, but were at the mercy of the manipulators.