I used to have a recurring dream wherein someone I trusted implicitly led me to a room I'd never been to before only to reveal that the world outside that room no longer existed, that my life until that point had been one huge cosmic joke, that everyone and everything I knew had been created to lull me into a false sense of security, and this was the punchline: nothing I believed was true.
I've always been fascinated by stories wherein characters discover that their life is not their own, that they're just pawns in some much bigger game, that - as Gloucester puts it to King Lear - "as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods... they kill us for their sport". Stories in which we're forced to confront the man behind the curtain. And though I've never read much Phillip K. Dick (something I intend to put right very soon), his short story The Adjustment Team appears to be a classic of the genre.
The concept has been adapted and updated by writer/director George Nolfi as the latest big screen outing for Matt Damon, The Adjustment Bureau. The film has received mixed reviews and unfair comparisons with Christopher Nolan's Inception, but I loved it. It's unusual these days to see a movie where you just don't know what will happen next.
Damon's flourishing politician David Norris accidentally stumbles across the fact that his life is not his own due to a slip up by his overworked "handler". The Adjustment Bureau, a supernatural organisation of benevolent "angels" are guiding Norris towards political success because they know he can have a positive impact on the world, and they won't let anything stand in his way - certainly not an unplanned romance with a kooky dancer played by Emily Blunt.
What makes the conceit effective is that the Adjustment Bureau themselves are neither all-powerful nor omnipotent. They have powers beyond ours, but they also have to follow rules and procedure like everybody else. They're just doing their job, and sometimes they don't even know why - their employer doesn't always let them in on the bigger picture. Anthony Mackie and Mad Men's John Slattery do an excellent job of portraying the day to day frustrations of these bureaucratic guardians, so we sympathise with them almost as much as we do their pawn, Norris.
The film is by no means perfect. Emily Blunt's character is one of those adorably / annoyingly eccentric Hollywood girlfriends who simply don't exist in real life. Terence Stamp hams it up like Zod as Adjustment Bureau hardman Thompson. The script stumbles into clunky exposition and the final dramatic set-piece seems contrived to give us an action-packed third act the story really doesn't require. But despite all that, I still preferred it to Inception - because this film has heart. It has a warmth that Nolan's film was lacking, for all its eye-bleeding special effects, and it spends time building characters we care about. I won't argue with anyone who tells me Inception is the better film, but I know which one I'd rather watch again.
