Brief Encounters: Fate and Chance in The Adjustment Bureau

Possible spoilers ahead.

“I’ve been riding this bus every day for three years hoping that I’d see you again,” says David Norris (Matt Damon) to Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt).

How many people can honestly say that they haven’t done something similar: frequented a place where we’ve had a chance meeting with someone we’d like to see again? Maybe she rides this bus every day or every week or at least very often. Maybe he goes to that CVS a lot. Maybe she regularly eats at the restaurant. Maybe we can accidentally meet there again. Maybe it’s a little stalkerish, but who can say they haven’t at least thought this? The Adjustment Bureau tackles a lot of big issues, proposes some very intriguing scenarios and ultimately, like many other science-fiction stories, sets itself up for disappointment, but it perfectly captures the euphoria of chance meetings and our questions about fate and choice (or as Robert Frost would say: “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…”).

What if I had left home 5 minutes earlier? Or five minutes later? What if I had gone somewhere else for lunch? If I had done anything different, would things have turned out the same? Is there a reason why we met? Can I even make my own decisions? Is life a road map or a blank page?

The Adjustment Bureau is based on a story (which I haven’t read) by the great science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick, and its ideas about choice bear some resemblance to other movies such as Minority Report (also based on a Dick story) and Dark City, which is visually quoted in the strange hat-wearing men and a scene where the mysterious team of men freezes workers in an office building. But The Adjustment Bureau proposes a fascinating concept of its own: a company (of sorts) that monitors human activities to make sure that they go according to a Plan written by “the Chairman.”

The biggest problem for the bureau is that the Plan can’t account for human nature and emotion. The smallest events can have an enormous influence on a person’s emotions, which can completely change the way that they act. The characters in the film call these “ripples.” I loved the scene where the Adjusters see a kiss in the immediate future for David and Elise and desperately try to prevent it because of the enormous ripples that it will spread. Like Dark City, The Adjustment Bureau features non-human figures that are completely baffled by the ways that feelings dictate people’s actions. Humans are irrational creatures. Even if we know that one path will lead to a better outcome than another, we might choose the worse path, letting our emotions decide rather than our reason. This is the dilemma facing David Norris: he can either achieve political success or be with the woman he loves.

Unfortunately, the ending of the film is rather problematic (Seriously, major spoilers ahead). The build-up to the climax is brilliant: David learns how to take on the powers of the Adjusters so that he can move quickly through New York City and find Elise. So far, the movie has done a great job of dealing with its dramatic structure: if you introduce a concept (particularly in science-fiction) you cannot let it go unexplored. Let’s call it Chekov’s Hat and Doorknob. This leads to a rather wonderful chase sequence.

But the movie steps out onto dangerous ground when David decides that he wants to meet the Chairman and talk about the Plan. It had to head in this direction, but it’s a dangerous one. The movie could either show the characters essentially meeting God (which could go horribly wrong), or it could figure out some reason why the characters cannot reach that point. Instead of going the more ambitious route, the movie plays it safe. If I understood correctly, they cannot meet the Chairman because “he takes on many forms.” This does not ruin the entire movie, but it simply is not compatible with the film’s original premise that portrays God as something like the head of a corporation. The chairman of a corporation should not be that mysterious (maybe the movie should have been called Chairman & Me). The brilliance of this concept is that it is a tangible visualization of fate, in the same way that Inception uses architecture to visualize the subconscious. The problem with The Adjustment Bureau is that it might have stuck its neck out a little too far. A meeting with God would probably be far too literal, but once the possibility of that had been raised, it was impossible for me to forget it. Few science-fiction films have gone all the way with their ideas and most of them have not seen great critical and commercial success (see Knowing), so the film tries to pull back and ends up just being rather disappointing.

However, the movie closes with a very interesting idea: that if we are going to have free will, we need to own it, come what may. We need to understand what it is to have free will and what it is to not have it. We need to make our choices and own the consequences. We can look back on a choice, an important decision or a chance meeting and wonder what would have happened if we had done something different, but we made that choice, “and that has made all the difference.”