Chairman is another of His names

Rating: 7/10 (7 October 2012)

The Adjustment Bureau starts like an election year movie. As we are in 2012 this may be the right time for such films, but it quickly quits that path to go into a direction that I personally find even more interesting and attractive that the life and career of a politician who may be ruined because of intrigues or just because he will follow his own personal instincts and chose love even at the risk of his career. We get these all in the film but also much more, as we can expect from a film based on a short story by Philip K. Dick.
The world, we learn pretty soon is not completely run according to hazard. Actually there is a plan, a well organized plan and a quite big bureaucratic system with a well-established hierarchy which makes sure everything happens according to the plan and in extreme situations takes measures to adjust the disturbances. One of these happens to our heroes – the candidate senator played by Matt Damon meets accidentally and falls for the beautiful and talented ballerina played by Emily Blunt and they do not forget and search each other despite being separated for years and insist on getting together despite the plans of the great institution that was targeting the hero to become a future president, but a bachelor one for some reasons. In the antic tragedy the name of the institution was Destiny, Christianity and other religions call Him God, in this film his name is Chaiman, and his clerks have all very handy tablets which can be of help to a lot of things including shortcuts by secret backdoors in traffic-jammed Manhattan (sure, I want one, Apple, please!).
One does not feel at all that this is a first long feature film for director George Nolfi. However at some point I regretted this not being his second or third film – he has talent in telling a story, skills in directing the actors, if he only had dared going deeper in the direction of the dilemma and confrontation between fate and good will – we would have maybe received an even better movie. But even so The Adjustment Bureay is smart and sensible and better than the average.