The Most Underrated Philip K. Dick Adaptation Deserves To Be Seen
Adjust your memory of The Adjustment Bureau.
A charismatic young politician campaigning for the New York Senate has a chance encounter with a ballet dancer. The attraction is immediate; they banter as though they’ve known each other for years. For a man so resigned to having his personality, anecdotes, and attire focus group-tested for mass appeal, here’s a stranger who instinctively understands exactly who he is, and can call him out when he’s pretending to be someone he’s not. Their meet-cute is short-lived, yet indelible. He’ll wake up the next morning thinking of her. He’ll spend far longer hoping to run into her again. He will.
Sweeping romances aren’t really one of sci-fi novelist Philip K. Dick’s pet concerns. Instead, the author’s short stories and novels deal heavily in conspiracies, the concept of reality as nothing more than an elaborate illusion, surveillance, a pervasive sense of paranoia, and a lone individual who finds himself pitted against a powerful corporation. While these themes do recur in The Adjustment Bureau, loosely adapted from Dick’s 1954 short story Adjustment Team, the 2011 film trades the terror of a man discovering he’s walked into a “de-energized” office — a process that makes his colleagues appear gray, drained of life, their bodies crumbling into ash — for the tragedy of a couple who finds out that the shadowy organization behind such reality-altering manipulations is intent on separating them.
It’s all part of The Plan. At least according to the bureau, whose employees in the film don’t undertake major refurbishments (or generate the accompanying horrific imagery) as in the short story. Instead, they make minor-yet-strategic tweaks to people’s lives — a spilled cup of coffee here, a lagging internet connection there — to ensure everyone is exactly where they need to be at all times, humanity stays on course and any “ripples” are avoided. Errant individuals get reset, their memories and personalities erased.
“When my producing partner brought me the short story, I thought, what a great conception for a movie, the idea that fate is a group of people subtly pushing you back on plan,” said writer-director George Nolfi in an interview. “He also said, ‘You could do this as a love story. Your lead falls in love for the first time in his life and the adjuster comes along and says, sorry, there’s been a mistake. You weren’t even supposed to meet her.’ For whatever reason, my reaction to that was, I think I know how to write that.”
Nolfi swapping out the short story’s real estate agent for a politician protagonist is one of his smarter adaptation choices. David Norris (Matt Damon) eventually escapes the rigid scrutiny and meticulous planning of his profession and finds another line of work, only to find out that his whole life has been a series of carefully orchestrated events nudged into place by a group of men watching him. Of course his immediate instinct is to rebel. Before he met Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt), David’s singular aim was to get the public to love him; now he’s found someone he loves back. The film contrasts the breeziness of their connection and the ease with which they fall into a shared language against the urgency of the bureau’s attempts to split them up. For every diverging path the agency sets them on, they circle right back around to each other.
The organization’s strict rules — doors across the city double up as portals, but only open for employees wearing a hat, for example — are quite frankly nonsensical, but perhaps intentionally so, particularly juxtaposed against the happy irrationality of love, that inexplicable pull towards someone.
Fans of Philip K. Dick’s cynical novel may be disappointed by the film’s love story.
Those anticipating the cynicism of Dick’s writing might find themselves disappointed. The Adjustment Bureau, warm and mushy instead, is one of the author’s most underrated adaptations. While it lacks the groundbreaking visual design of Blade Runner (1982), or the wry prescience of Total Recall (1990), it’s not only a thoughtful study of love, but also the ensuing heartache — you could consider someone the best person in the world, but what if you’re inadvertently holding them back from a better life? For all its underlying optimism, the film can be quietly gutting. A brief but devastating bit of dialogue reveals that every tragedy in David’s life has been wrought by the bureau. He, in turn, hurts Elise terribly, believing the calculated projection that her future would be brighter without him in it. Do these characters have free will? they wonder. Does it even exist?
In channeling these ideas into a grand love story in which the universe itself conspires against a couple, The Adjustment Bureau makes you root for them all the more.
