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Rating: Null/10 (17 January 2013)

"Is love the ultimate affirmation of free will, or its negation?" - Anson Shupe
Based on "The Adjustment Team", a 1954 short story by Philip K. Dick, George Nolfi's "The Adjustment Bureau" stars Matt Damon as a Congressman who has a chance encounter with Elise, a beautiful young woman. Damon, it later turns out, is being groomed by an agency called The Adjustment Bureau. A cross between angelic beings, deities, extraterrestrials and Rene Magritte paintings, the members of the Bureau are essentially puppet-masters who control mankind. Led by a mysterious, god-like figure called The Chairman, the Bureau manipulates various real world variables such that they have knock-on, future effects. Their goal? For Damon to fulfil his dream of becoming the future President of the United States. To accomplish this they must prevent Elise and Damon falling in love.
In the original short story, Dick turns the question of human agency into a real corporate agency – The Adjustment Bureau. The Bureau then essentially becomes a metaphor for investigating various then-novel ideas relating to hard and soft free-will, determinism, indeterminism, predestination, existentialism and cause-and-effect. The idea is that human beings have much less free-will than they typically imagine, and that a myriad of invisible entities, or invisible variables – social, external, environmental, biological, neurological, genetic, cultural, language etc – are responsible for our actions, thoughts and who we are. Indeed, many recent experiments are starting to show that a large number of human activities, actions, thought processes etc are preconscious; they occur before we consciously decide to do them. Later Dick stories would push this further. The Self, what you think of as a free, independent controlling agent, would be reconfigured altogether; it becomes both Other and Nothing, a phenomenal self model (an accidental byproduct of an interplay between the senses and consciousness) whose content is not innate but impersonally programmed by extrinsic sources. The self, what you think as You, is a relatively recently "built" neurocomputational model - not a soul or mental or coherent essence - which mistakes itself for an uncaused causer capable of initiating causal chains.
Today many neuroscientists are quite happy to cast away the notion of freewill, the Sovereigh Self and believe in something very much like Dick's "Adjustment Team". Entities do control us, they're just not literal sentient beings. To Eastern religions, this is hardly radical. Indeed, the major religions of both the East and the West can be seen as a response to the Self. Very broadly speaking, Western monotheistic religions assert the existence of a God whose authority, strength, demands and wisdom keep the Self concrete, whereas Eastern religions try to weaken these ideas, and stresses a kind of depersonalisation, or collapsing of all barriers. One side's ego boosting (you're real, you matter, God's given you the ability to choose, a preoccupation with acquisition etc), one seeks ego death (the self as illusion, a preoccupation with letting go, self as illusionary artifact of the mind, no independent bodies, only interconnected matter etc).
George Nolfi is a Christian, however, and has constructed "The Adjustment Beaurea" to reflect a very conservative, traditionally Christian slant. So in his hands The Chairman covertly becomes a stand-in for God and Damon is vaguely emblematic of various Biblical tenets. Damon has no choice, no free will, is a lowly animal, until he "disobeys god's plan" and "chooses love", which is then revealed to have been "the plan all along". Like a good Christian, Damon questions whether his will is better than god's plan and asks how can he be responsible if all is predestined by God. The final message is what some old Christian philosophers called the "axiom of authentic love". God's plan in the film is for Damon to freely choose between loving another and fulfilling his dreams of becoming the President.
While this may make a reasonably competent action thriller, philosophically it's mostly stupid (continuous rewrites have left the film thematically incoherent). In the real world there is no plan, there is no god, the lack of a plan doesn't necessarily mean man now has free will (one can have no free will precisely because they are buffeted by arbitrary variables) and the notion that "choosing love" signifies "free choice" ignores the fact that there are few things less free than "romantic love". Today many studies are starting to show that in issues of love, learning, choices, actions etc, your brain/body makes decisions long before you consciously know it, man acting before he becomes conscious of making the decision to act. In effect, we are so programmed that we can't even conceive of just how programmed we are. This is not to say that there is "no such thing as free will", but there are nuances and factors involved that completely contradict Nolfi's false binary. Nolfi puts "Damon freely choosing to love Elise" on one side, and "Damon forced to obey a rigid plan" on the other, but "choosing to love Elise" is exactly as "unfree" as "obeying the plan", and real world "plan's" are both as whimsically arbitrary yet as rigidly coded as this act of love. What the film wants you to believe in is a very Christian, Western version of Man as a wholly autonomous, free agents who is "allowed by God to be free" but only so that he may "choose between good or bad". It's not quite the Biblical blackmail tale of the New Testament, but is almost.
5/10 - Worth one viewing.