You will remember the idea of the deus ex machina — the “god out of the machine”. Its origin lies in ancient plays: when resolution was needed towards the end, a deity would descend from above, cranked down in some kind of contraption, to provide the necessary denouements. And you will know that it’s not really a compliment to say of a present-day work (theatrical, literary or cinematic) that a deus ex machina was required to resolve matters at the close.
Weirdly, The Adjustment Bureau, the new Matt Damon vehicle, is all deus ex machina. The whole damn thing is. It’s the basis of the plot, it’s what propels the story, it’s how it all gets resolved at the end.
The idea is this — and the spoilers are these.
Damon plays David Norris, a popular young politician from Brooklyn, who’s making a play for Congress. He seems to have a bright future ahead of him, but his bid for office is stymied at the last minute. He intends to try again, but on the very night that the results of the vote are announced, he meets a mysterious young woman who, within an instant or two, has captured his heart.
As in so many movies, this is love at first sight. Still, some pursuit is required on David’s part, because the young woman (she’s called Elise) disappears after that first encounter. But then she pops up again. Kiss, kiss, love, love, et cetera, then they are separated once more — and David has to spend ages trying to find Elise again while also attempting to restart his political career.
Host of supernatural agents
So far, so made-for-TV human drama, even “based on a true story”. But The Adjustment Bureau has another agenda entirely, as befits a movie based on a story by Philip K Dick. For, you see, behind the scenes of real life are a host of supernatural agents whose job it is to tweak the events of the day-to-day existences of ordinary mortals to make sure everything goes according to Plan. They intervene in our lives to keep everything on track.
It’s nice to know, too, that they try to make these tweaks as small and unnoticeable as possible. They can do this because they have knowledge of how a tiny happening, the spilling of a cup of coffee, say, can ramify through a whole life. Spill the coffee, miss the bus, don’t meet love-of-life, don’t get distracted from political career, finally become president. Or something. For want of a nail —
And, as mentioned, there’s a Plan. None of this would make the darned bit of sense if there wasn’t a Plan — which is pretty much what some religious people believe about our lives on this planet now. They even like to believe there is a Master Plan, and that it’s in the capable hands of God. This is doubtless comforting: when something goes wrong it’s good to be able to tell yourself that it’s not just random kak hitting you, but rather that it’s part of the Plan.
According to the The Adjustment Bureau, the Plan is administered by “the Chairman”, obviously a corporate sort of way to say God or the Supreme Being or Nobodaddy or whatever you like to call him/her/it. This is also coy religious-speak masquerading as non-religious-speak, but it will fool no one. In fact, it can appeal only to those who believe there is a Plan, that there is a Supreme Being, and that there are angels constantly trying to make sure that everything stays on-Plan.
Angels in business suits
The agents of the Adjustment Bureau, those making David Norris very unhappy for larger cosmic reasons, are very much angels in business suits. One of them is even asked, at one point, whether he’s an angel, and he replies in an ambiguous manner that implies: “Yes we are, but we don’t want to call ourselves that because that’s all a bit sort of squishy-sentimental religion-specific, and because it’s all very TV.” Do not think Della Reese.
In any case, whatever they call themselves, it makes no sense. If there’s a God-like Chairman with a Plan, why can’t he simply command that it follow its course? Is he omnipotent or not? Of course this is a problem with Christian theology in general, solved only by the notion of free will and a deity who reins in his omnipotence to allow humanity its share of suffering and so on. We must choose to love the deity or it doesn’t count.
In The Adjustment Bureau, the Chairman obviously isn’t omnipotent if angel-agents are needed to rush about the world tweaking things. The Plan is obviously not infallible. I suspect this speaks to a deeper instinct in humanity, one underneath the belief in God and Plans; it tells us that things are unstable, that nobody’s in proper control and that all sorts of semi-supernatural interventions are needed or at least wished for. We may feel there is a God or gods but, like pagans, we are not convinced he or they are in fact fully in control, and even if they are they may not in fact have our best interests at heart.
But let’s not get lost in such speculation. It’s pointless. We keep getting told in the movie how essential it is that the Plan is stuck to; and yet, at the end, the deus who controls all the angels in the machina simply changes the Plan.
Basically, the movie wants us to imagine there’s a Plan. But it also wants us to believe that if you display enough free will, enough resistance and enough love, and if you do a lot of running through the rain, as Damon does here, the Plan can be changed. The Plan that can’t be changed can be changed.
Breaking down
So what was the flippin’ point? This just makes it all seem very arbitrary. Life undoubtedly is arbitrary, on many levels, but that’s not what The Adjustment Bureau wants the viewer to invest in or believe in, at least not if we are to go with this narrative and find the travails of David and Elise interesting.
Which they are not. The movie spends so much time trying to convey how all this adjustment nonsense works that it can barely string a plot together. It’s all machina, and this machina has a flat tyre, possibly an engine that has seized up entirely. Damon is stodgy and Emily Blunt, as Elise, barely believable at all — unless you read her as a fey, late-period hippy who smoked too much dagga as a child.
Even the advent of Terence Stamp, as a senior adjuster, about halfway through, fails to kick the movie into a gear higher than plod. It’s not that it isn’t trying to move fast; it’s that it’s moving in circles and jagged loops and not forward. That makes it all pretty dull.
It’s enough to make one despair about high-concept movies, about the problems of time, life, progress, free will and so on —
Oops, did I say I was despairing?
Enter God.