The Adjustment Bureau

City Paper Grade: C+

by Shaun Brady

[ CITY PAPER GRADE: C+ ]

PHILIP K. DICK'S FANS have learned to brace themselves at the release of each new adaptation, always hoping for a Blade Runner but always primed for the blasphemies of a Paycheck. The latest plunge into the author's paranoid imaginings starts out promisingly, with senatorial hopeful David Norris' (Matt Damon) life being manipulated by a shadowy cabal of fedora-clad functionaries.

Writer-director George Nolfi approaches these superhuman beings with a wry sense of humor: Though they're apparently immortal and hold the fate of humanity in their schematic notebooks, they approach their task with the weary drudgery of office drones — fate as the ultimate bureaucracy. Their work typically takes place beyond the notice of their subjects, but their plans for David's life go awry when he falls in love with Elise (Emily Blunt), a ballet dancer meant to reignite his political aspirations and then disappear.

The love story is an audience-coddling addition to the original story, a motivation that would be as good as any other if left as a basic MacGuffin, but Nolfi allows it to consume the film. Soon enough, the speculations on fate and free will, articulated most obviously by a glowering Terence Stamp as Damon's most persistent antagonist, give way to extravagant outpourings of emotion and endless chase scenes in service of overripe melodrama.

Where Nolfi goes most awry is in never adequately explaining why David and Elise must be kept apart; the speculative side of Dick's fiction is shrugged off for a because-we-told-you belligerence as obstinate as the feuding families of Verona. We understand that David is destined for a greatness threatened by domestic bliss (Elise's destiny is only ever defined in relation to his, of course), but what that means to the grand design is left frustratingly vague. The Godhead in charge of all this supernatural busywork is ultimately deflated into little more than hazy, sentimental New Age hokum.