ropey

Rating: 4/10 (13 October 2012)

A young man running for the US Senate meets a mysterious, charismatic woman on the night he loses the election. He falls in love instantly, but higher powers have decreed they cannot be together, and set out to keep them apart.
Great acting talent compels you to the first two thirds of this movie, but the inherent promise is of a great pay-off, and instead we get a damp squib.
Matt Damon plays David Norris as a humanised Bourne, a man driven to seek something out and fairly unstoppable in his insistence. Emily Blunt is Elise, and as usual lights up the screen with her naturalism. I first came across her in My Summer of Love, and was recently impressed with her in My Sister's Sister. Yet again, as in Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, she takes a very average script and raises it up a notch. I think I may be in love with her. Anthony Mackie plays the near-omnipotent others beings as human and fallible, which makes it all the more interesting - think a down-to-earth version of Wings of Desire.
But what lets this movie down is that the premise is intellectually unsatisfying. It is laid out in its starkest terms by Terence Stamp as Thompson in his denial of free will. Apparently, anything noteworthy human kind has achieved has been due to the guiding hand of these higher powers, and anything dark - wars, genocide, environmental damage - is our own poor fault. So free will was an experiment that failed, and has been replaced with the illusion of free will.
Except... David and Elise have a love so strong, so unprecedented, that they have caused the higher powers to re-think the whole grand scheme.
Now, David and Elise have chemistry, but they aren't Romeo and Juliet, or Anthony and Cleopatra. They're not even Thelma and Louise. They're more Jack and Rose. So it is a hard sell to say these two have a love unprecedented in human history. And to base the ending, and so the whole film, on having the audience buy into that.
So go along to Adjustment Bureau for the ride, but don't get your hopes up about the destination.