Film Review: The Adjustment Bureau

When a film truly hinges on getting a certain aspect right, it helps if you actually deliver on that aspect. The Adjustment Bureau could hinge on several numerous themes, but it ultimately comes down to one that it just doesn't deliver on. Many have made premature comparisons between The Adjustment Bureau and Inception without having seen the recent release. In truth, the two couldn't be more polar opposites, and that's really a disappointment for this particular film. The film isn't a mind-bending action feature with psychological consequences, but rather a simple romance about a force meant to keep people on course with their own destiny.

The film follows David Norris, a politician attempting to be elected to the U.S. senate for New York. After suffering a massive failure, Norris meets Elise, an aspiring British dancer who he practically falls in love with after a five minute conversation. To be honest, I don't quite know why. Anyway, after he keeps going after this girl, he accidentally finds out about the Adjustment Bureau, a secret agency meant to keep people on course with the way their lives have been set. They tell Norris that he can't see Elise ever again, and yet he keeps running into her again and again. Norris defies the fates and risks everything so that he can be with this girl.

This brings me to my first major gripe about The Adjustment Bureau. What is so special about this particular pairing. I've seen true love occur in film before, or even misguided puppy love, and it had more fireworks than the two of these had. That's not to say that Damon and Blunt have no chemistry, but the dialogue between the two is so pedestrian that I couldn't possibly believe that there was anything special about their union. It was occasionally a bit sweet, but nothing truly life changing. The two characters are interesting, and Matt Damon and Emily Blunt both do fantastic jobs, but the dialogue just doesn't quite make it.

Also, for an all seeing and all powerful force, the men in gray suits and hats are kind of clueless. If they can see how the course of events will go, how come they can't see Elise coming, or even more relevant, a car that's about to hit them. There are loopholes that are never explained, and the men of the bureau certainly aren't as intelligent or sophisticated as the observers on Fringe. Fringe is actually the most that this film could have aspired for, yet didn't. This sort of premise seems ripe for paranoia and artistic excellence, but director George Noyce instead opts for a more predictable approach to this story.

Perhaps all my problems with the film can be packed into one actually simple problem: the writing. This actually brings me back to the initial contrast between The Adjustment Bureau and Inception. Christopher Nolan realized that with stories like these, you could not dumb down the story for the audience. You had to make the dialogue entertaining enough for the audience to take in the massive information, and over time the film made sense. The first time I saw Inception, I did get left behind. That hasn't happened once since. I never got left behind in The Adjustment Bureau, because the dialogue and the specificity of the story is so massively dumbed down. There wouldn't be so many gripes or loopholes in this film if they had taken the time to fully flesh out the mythology in an intriguing manner. The ending to the film is the perfect example, because it just feels so dumbly forced with no real logic to back it up.

Now that I've gotten what I didn't like out of the way, lets take a look at the positive. The cinematography, although a bit too simple, does excel at certain points. The inspirational message of the film remains somewhat intact, and certainly enough for most regular moviegoers, but as I noted before, they could have gone further with it. The performances are spectacular across the board, even if they aren't given that much to work with. Probably the best complement I can give this film is the score by Thomas Newman. It manages to contain that sense of emotion, possibility, and paranoia in a truly spectacular way. The Adjustment Bureau suffers from an intelligence deficiency, and that's a problem for this kind of film. It's just so dumb, fo' real.

C