Cinema Saturdays: The Adjustment Bureau

Great artists manipulate you in ways you don't understand, using the subconscious. Some of them know that they're doing this, some do it simply out of great talent, but it's always there. In literature, we call the subconscious part of the work the subtext, the story under the story. When Gatsby looks at the green light across the bay, we instinctively know it means money, success, the Great American Dream. It means that to our subconscious whether or not F. Scott Fitzgerald purposefully put it in there or not. Good writers take their subconscious (or parts of it) and transfer it to the reader.

I love the movie The Adjustment Bureau. Here's why.

The movie is about a simple man that has a bit of bad luck. He meets a girl, it looks like love, and then he loses her phone number.

But wait -- through a bit of movie magic our hero discovers that it's just not bad luck that causes him to lose the girl, it's the fates themselves. He catches the people-behind-the-scenes in the act of re-arranging his life. Of course, he's not happy. The rest of the movie is his struggle with, pick your name: angels, aliens, demigods, agent smiths, etc. There are entities that are able to change the universe, he knows they're there, he can't tell anybody, but he still wants the girl.

I love the movie because it is the ultimate little guy vs. the universe. This guy has no shot at all against heaven, yet he persists. I love it for the way it presents the supernatural. Are these angels, glowing, with halos, flying around on wings? No, they are not. They're just a bunch of dumb-schmuck-looking business guys in frumpy suits and hats from the 60s. These are suits, these are BigCorp types. We have seen heaven and it's just another office job. They probably even have casual Fridays.

So the problems we are presented with, while magnificently existential, are really just some dude who has a complaint with the main office and a bunch of suits trying to figure out what to do with him. Once again, something a lot of us understand.

The final reason I love this movie is hats. The overlords, while looking and acting just like us, are able to move around magically through the use of hats. So there are a lot of people wearing hats in this flick. I approve. (Oddly enough, if you view any of the promo material for the movie, you will not find any images of the stars wearing hats. It seems hat-wearing is still so uncool that there's no way they're going to use pics of movie stars wearing hats. The bastards.)

You'll like it.