The Adjustment Bureau

Here we go again.

It’s usually amusing when Hollywood enters the realm of faith. All too often, movies create something thin and flimsy about something wide and deep. Sometimes the weak film is made by religious people trying to convert others, and thus is more of a sermon than a story. In other cases, such as Clint Eastwood’s recent “Hereafter,”  the film reflects a soft-focus, thinly thought-out spirituality that is about as satisfying as a dinner of potato chips. Rarely do we get a film that is the rich product of years of insight, thought, and work. “The Adjustment Bureau,” written and produced by former philosophy graduate student George Nolfi, is such a film.  

Matt Damon plays David, a young U.S. Senator from New York with a passion for politics and the charisma to take him far. On the night of his first electoral loss, David meets Elise (Emily Blunt), a beautiful dancer and free spirit. Sparks fly immediately. The two share a kiss but then she runs off. Surely they’re fated to meet again. As it turns out, they’re specifically destined not to meet again. Harry, a man in a suit and spiffy hat (Anthony Mackie) is assigned to follow David. His goal? To keep David and Elise from reconnecting.

Harry works for the Adjustment Bureau, a cosmic bureaucracy tasked with keeping humanity on a complex, far-reaching path known as The Plan. The Chairman writes, and constantly rewrites, The Plan. Both Elise and David have bright futures under The Plan, but they don’t include each other. Harry and his co-workers have plenty of tricks to nudge humanity back into compliance, including controlling phones, objects, and ducking through cool sci-fi doors that are shortcuts to other places.

Their power is not absolute, however. They’re limited by the Chairman’s rules. David, once the scope of the conspiracy is revealed to him, must decide whether to accept The Plan or fight it in the cause of true love.

It’s just your basic free-will versus predestination question.

“I hope people would leave the movie asking themselves about these questions that have been occupying theologians and philosophers for thousands of years,” Nolfi told me, “The earliest written literature…Gilgamesh…Greek literature…was grappling with these issues of fate versus free will. I hope as people walk out, they realize this is a big question about their existence. And bring their own faith or philosophy into that conversation.”

The movie gives just enough sci –fi action to keep the dry philosophical question interesting. After all, if there is such a thing as fate or God, then it would matter. It would really matter. He would care about what you do for a living and who you marry and how you spent your days. Fate doesn’t matter if it serves you a ham sandwich instead of a Reuben, but does very much if it lures you into killing your own father as happens to poor Oedipus.

“The Adjustment Bureau” brings it home to modern audiences by interjecting romance, the part of life in which human beings often feel the least control. On some level, we choose who we love. On another level, no amount of will or determination can make a person romantically love or not love another.

David and Elise love each other. It’s a fact like the color of the sky or the atomic weight of hydrogen. Since neither is married to anyone else, there’s no moral barrier to their love. This becomes the great question of the film. Why, if they love each other and they’re unattached, would the Chairman work to oppose their union? It boils down to a great future for each one, but a future that would be diminished if they wed because their drive to succeed would be buried under the happiness of their love. In other words, they are “enough” to each other and won’t work in other areas.

This is very profound.

Nolfi doesn’t want to pin down who the Chairman may represent or how fate and free-will interact. “Sometimes I think there is no answer that will be satisfying to everybody. I want the movie to be exciting and rewarding on its own terms,” he said, but he added, “I want to raise questions and get them thinking.”

On that account, he certainly succeeded.