Why I Liked... The Adjustment Bureau (2011)

(Dir. George Nolfi Starring: Matt Damon, Emily Blunt)

I love a man who can pull off a snappy fedora, throw it on the ground and make passionate love to me.

Fedoras are cool. I wear a fedora now.

No I don’t, but in The Adjustment Bureau they do. A lot. In fact, someone within the mystical Bureau obviously had a bit of a hat fetish and decided to take it five steps further to create...magic hats. Yes. Magic hats. Hats that, in essence, give the wearer magical door-opening powers. No, really. The doors allow the wearer to open doors to say, a random office on the street, and instead it opens up to a different part of the city entirely. Or a warehouse. Or the actual Adjustment Bureau.

So enough about the hats-while cool looking, they bugged me in the end.

Unlike the awesomely teched-out Moleskines...

Here’s why: the Adjustment Bureau is a place where people (we don’t know what or who they are) basically keep track of our lives, and for the sake of the over-arching ‘plan’ adjust our lives to suit it. So if we were to turn left instead of right, leading us down the path of becoming the next Stalin, they’d presumably swoop in and make us turn right and just continue on with our lives (in the film they take credit for the Renaissance and cite sick days for the World Wars and Cuban Missile Crisis).

So that’s what they do. And over the course of three years and eleven months, we follow budding politician David Norris (Damon) and how he’s been affected by the Bureau. Apparently they’ve been following him for quite some time now, and I get the idea that they were planning on continuing on following him until he reached their pre-planned destination.

But then he meets Elise (Blunt), a modern ballet dancer whom he quickly falls for. But oh no, the Bureau isn’t the big fan of this development-it would bring Norris off the fast track and that’s just not part of The Plan.

Action and a lot of cardiovascular activity ensue.

 Dancing involves cardio...

Which, while they do that, brings me to the whole idea of this film-free will. Do we have it? Or are there really people out there with magic hats adjusting our every action and movement in life to suit their needs? Frankly, I’m not one for massive conspiracy theories, and call me a naive fool, but generally, I believe what I’m told by the authorities. With a massive grain of salt of course, but still-I tend to believe. All that stuff about aliens in Area 51 and the government actively hushing it up just makes me roll my eyes. Really, aliens? No. That firmly belongs in the category of The X-Files and science fiction.

But enough about real life conspiracy theories. No, let’s just talk about why the high point of this film were the accessories.

Hats are fun to wear. I like hats. But giving hats power? Nuh-uh. There’s a scene in which one of the magic hat wearers (Roger Sterling from Mad Men! Oh, for it to be 2012 already...) drops his and isn’t able to open a door at all. Not even a normal door. Not even a door that has no underlying powers whatsoever. Which begs the question-when they wake up in the morning, do they have to put on their hat to go to the toilet? I mean, really-that’s kind of a drag.

All dressed up and to the toilet we go!

Anyway, so these guys apparently control our free will, and we’d never know about it. And there’s nothing we can do about it, save for the men in hats sleeping on the job and making a mistake. That we’d never know was a mistake because we’d never know about it to begin with.

So...what was the point of this film again?