The Adjustment Bureau

"I Guess The Lord Must Be in New York City"
or
"Dicking Around with People's Lives..."

The stories of Philip K. Dick have provided all sorts of story-fodder for the movies for both good or ill: Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, Paycheck, A Scanner Darkly, Next, and Impostor.

 

They feature the sort of high-concept story-spine that easily translates into genre-bending sci-fi/fantasy films that are the easiest thing to translate to the screen short of a superhero property. Just put a slight spin on a story concept—a police force that stops crimes before they happen, spies and detectives who are mentally undercover, a guy who can see into the future, but just eight minutes out—all odd concepts that illuminate the character dilemma in a way that a straight story might not highlight. You don't have to be a genius to "get" what the movie says. And the inevitable SFX look great on trailers.

So, here's The Adjustment Bureau, a paranoid conspiracist's validation of all things manipulated. Young senatorial candidate David Norris (Matt Damon) is about to lose an election big-time, due to some ill-considered party-decisions earlier in his life. In the men's room of the Waldorf, he practices his contrite, yet defiant acceptance speech, only to find that he is being overheard by Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt), who is evading hotel security after crashing a wedding upstairs.  It's a "meet-cute" as the two banter about Norris' loser-status and Elise becomes intrigued enough to plant a lip-lock on him. His campaign manager (the always welcome Michael Kelly) walks in just in time to catch this and bust it up to get Norris to the ballroom to admit defeat. I'd've fired him on the spot.

It's some time later and Norris is working for an investment capital firm with his manager. He's running a little late, so he doesn't notice a team of angular men in business suits and fedoras are shadowing him. One in particular—Harry (Anthony Mackie)—has an assignment: Norris must spill coffee on his shirt by 9:05 am, not any later. It's his job, says Agent Richardson (John Slattery), so don't screw it up. 

But, if he didn't, there wouldn't be a movie.

There's no use crying over un-spilled coffee, but as a result, the rest of the movie is the Team attempting to solve the mess the non-mess creates: Norris is able to catch his bus on-time, where he once again encounters Elise, and gets to work just in time to see the Pre-Destinators (my term) sweeping the office, the personnel frozen, and key players receiving a "mind-wipe." Norris catches on quickly, and tries to evade the invaders, only to find them around every office corner, calmly telling him that, really, he should take it easy and cooperate and "this" will all go a lot easier.

He wakes up in an empty warehouse, with his pursuers deigning to tell him the truth about things: "You've just seen behind the curtain you never knew existed."  They're a team of agents who manipulate events among humankind—a kind of Uber-illuminati ('"sometimes it's chance, sometimes it's us")—at the behest of "The Chairman." They lay down the law: He can't have a relationship with Elise, which David objects to ("Your entire world just changed and you're thinking about a woman?") as it's not in "the plan," and if he tells anybody about what he's seen, they'll make everyone think he's crazy, and "reset" him, leaving him basically lobotomized.* 

Norris is too much a free-thinker to obey the "button-down men of Fate" and the rest of the movie entails him "changing the curtains," as it were. It's very clever and director George Nolfi, (who wrote the screenplay for the similarly time-trippy Timeline, had fun adapting his screenplay "Honor Among Thieves" into what would become Ocean's Twelve, and was one of the team who wrote—and re-wrote—The Bourne Ultimatum) ingeniously keeps things moving at a good clip, while also staying one jump ahead of the story-complications inherent in the plot...while also doing enough cinematic sleight-of-hand to keep the Doubting Thomases in the audience from falling into plot-holes. He gets good performances out of everyone—allowing enough ad-libbing in the scenario to make it seem real and fresh, sort of a real-life version of the film's conceit of re-writing History in pencil before the Cosmic Ink dries. It's fast, fun, and fresh and avoids pretentiousness or taking itself too damn seriously. It is only after a little Time has passed that it feels a bit slight, but who could have anticipated that?

One thing is for sure: I gotta get me one of them hats!

* At that point I flashed on former CBS news-anchor Dan Rather walking down a New York Street and being attacked by men and all they said was "What's the frequency, Kenneth?"  Everybody acted like Rather had had "a spell," but I wonder if his attackers were wearing hats.

Olde Review: The Conversation

This was part of a series of reviews of the ASUW Film series back in the '70's. Except for some punctuation, I haven't changed anything from the way it was presented, giving the snarky, clueless kid I was back in the '70's a break. Any stray thoughts and updates I've included with the inevitable asterisked post-scripts.

The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1975) Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is an electronics expert dealing in surveillance. His latest assignment is to record a conversation between two very innocent young people in the park. It's a routine assignment, one that Harry handles with a perfectionist's care. But after he has the raw tape—after he has clarified it and re-channeled it—he hears a whispered fear that these two kids may get killed by Harry's employer. Old haunts plague Harry—past assignments he has carried out that led to his victim's deaths. And so he goes to confession to confess what may be a future sin. Confession—where one's private actions that are considered to be sins are revealed to a priest in order to free the sinner of guilt. But this too, is a surveillance—an invasion of one's privacy—ritualized in the name of religion. Surveillance is a part of our lives, then. And privacy is an illusion.

That scene in the confessional is about as close as Francis Ford Coppola comes to really dealing with surveillance in his film, The Conversation. Despite what many critics have said, Coppola makes no judgements on this subject. Surveillance is simply there as a device to be used for the movie. It's neither good nor bad. It's there to provide Coppola with a means of getting into a rather shallow appearances-are-deceiving mystery story—it's a very weak imitation of Antonioni's Blowup. When Harry Caul is caught in a surveillance trap ala his own devising, are we supposed to feel some satisfaction in this? Just because he's getting screwed, like he screwed all the others? Is surveillance justified in retribution, in other words? No. How can we take satisfaction in that? For surveillance — the ripping open of one's privacy — is being used, and nothing, really, not even revenge should make us condone it.
Awright, already, W______is it a good movie?

Okay, okay. Yeah, it's a good movie. It's...entertaining, in a shock-lull-shock-lull sort of way. Coppola has made a good movie, despite my reservations as to his morality on the subject. It's an o-k script—a little spare at times—with a lot of loose ends, and his direction is always assured. Gene Hackman manages to flesh out Harry Caul enough to make him an interesting person to watch for the couple of hours we do. And there is fine supporting acting from Allen Garfield, John Cazale (the weak brother, Fredo, in The Godfather), Frederic Forrest, Cindy Williams (she's good, despite the fact that she's totally mis-cast) and Robert Duvall (who is on for a very short time and doesn't receive a credit). But, the one thing that is technically outstanding is the sound of the film, produced by the work of its chief editor Walter Murch. Murch also worked on "The Godfathers" for Coppola, and creating what he terms "sound montages" for George Lucas' THX-1138 and American Graffiti. His talents with editing and sound mixing are outstanding,and hopefully Murch will, himself, be directing his own films.

Broadcast on KCMU-FM on January 27-28th, 1976

Murch would, indeed, direct one film (so far)—Return to Oz, in 1985—and it tanked. His intention was to make a genuine adaptation of one of L. Frank Baum's "Oz" books, rather than what the public was expecting—a sequel to the 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz. And his heart-felt, but scary, recreation of Baum's world didn't click with audiences. One would be sad if Murch didn't then personally supervise the entire post-production process of about one film per year. Films like Julia, The Godfather: Part III, Romeo Is Bleeding, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Ghost, The English Patient, First Knight, The Talented Mr. Ripley, K-19: The Widowmaker, Cold Mountain, Jarhead, and Francis Coppola's latest films. Busy guy. Eclectic talent.

This movie has dogged me my entire career, because it was assumed that, because Harry Caul could electronically filter out steel drums from the background of a murmured recording enough for you to hear what the people were saying that any sound facility could do it, too. No. Not really, you can't. You can tune, you can attenuate, you can try reversing the polarity of a channel to eliminate shared sounds on both channels of a stereo recording, but steel drums? That's a good one. They call that "Movie Magic."

But the kid is right...this is warmed-over Blow-up without the illusion of film-making, or illusion of illusion that makes that film so compelling. At least it's better than cold, left-over Blow-Up like Brian De Palma's Blow OUT (in that, field-audio recorder John Travolta must piece together a Chappaquidick-like incident from his sound-recordings and pictures taken from a "Zapruder"-like film--it doesn't pass the incredulity test). And Coppola has to resort to a "cheat"—he changes the actual recording, the one element in the movie that has to be set in stone, to come up with his conclusions. One could make a case...blah blah blah, the fact is, interpretation or not, he planted a card in the deck.

It is, though, a really good paranoid thriller of the type that seemed to be born of the post-Watergate era. And Hackman's insulated Caul is another example of how that actor can take an under-written part (deliberately, I should say--Caul doesn't talk much on purpose) and make him a living, breathing human being you can recognize and, despite his many failings, sympathize with. There is one actor I didn't mention because I didn't really know who he was...yet. He'd made a living doing parts on television, and done a small role in American Graffiti, but after this film he was about to quit acting and go back to carpentry when a role in a sci-fi movie by Coppola's pal George Lucas changed things for him. Harrison Ford has a small role as "The Director's" menacing assistant.

Oh...the reason I made such a big deal of the confessional scene? I used that to start off the recorded version of this review.

In 1995, The Conversation was chosen to be a part of the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress seeing it as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."