• The Adjustment Bureau

In its source-material form—a short story by revered speculative-fiction author Philip K. Dick—The Adjustment Bureau is an edgy little tale of a man seeing behind the curtain of our acknowledged reality. Writer and first-time director George Nolfi takes a chance on turning that material into a love story and a meditation on the nature of free will. The fact that it works as often as it does is testimony to how many little things Nolfi gets right in a movie that could have collapsed if that one opening scene didn’t work.

The hook in The Adjustment Bureau is something David witnesses that ordinary humans aren’t supposed to see: He inadvertently stumbles upon the work of supernatural “case workers” tasked with steering people back to the plan set out for us by “The Chairman.” David agrees to keep the secret—the alternative being a complete “re-set” of his mind and personality—but there’s part of the plan he doesn’t know at the time: The Chairman, it seems, has grand plans for David’s political future. And in order for those plans to come to fruition, David must never be allowed to re-connect with Elise, the girl he met one night years earlier but hasn’t been able to forget since.

A story like this could easily get caught up in the “rules” of the Adjustment Bureau’s universe, and Nolfi does a surprisingly terrific job of explaining details that might seem like arbitrary plot devices, as well as giving an ordinary mortal a fair shot against what are clearly intended to be the equivalent of angels. There’s a fair amount of exposition, but Nolfi wraps it in sharp dialogue and performances that give the pronouncements an extra kick of significance. It’s one thing to write speeches about why human action is manipulated by external forces; it’s another, and wiser, thing to put those speeches in the mouths of terrific actors like Terence Stamp, Anthony Mackie and Mad Men’s John Slattery.

But that’s just one of many indications that Nolfi has a clear and ambitious plan for what could have been just a simple chase thriller. Like Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone episodes, The Adjustment Bureau wants to stow a lesson at the center of its suspense, which often is a recipe for heavy- handedness. Here, there’s a deft touch at play even with weighty matters in the balance, a chance to contemplate what it really means when people claim to believe there’s a “plan” for them, as well as whether the braver life is one that submits to that plan or one that strikes its own path. All that, and there are great throwaway bits like the graffiti that turns up on the wall outside David’s favorite watering hole.

And yet, in a way, it really does all come down to that first scene between David and Elise, and what Damon and Blunt do with that relationship throughout The Adjustment Bureau. It’s kind of a textbook example of efficiency in performance and narrative because we’re being asked to accept that someone is willing not just to sacrifice himself, but to change the destiny of the world, for love. That’s bold talk for a tight little genre thriller that could have cruised on the prospect of chase scenes and unstoppable eternal beings. Then again, that’s what happens when someone— maybe even a filmmaker—chooses a distinctive approach instead of accepting that one way of doing things is inevitable. 

THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU