98 - The Adjustment Bureau

    A promising young politician loses his Senate election, and shortly before delivering a concession speech, meets a woman who inspires him.  This leads to him discovering that an outside force is charged with manipulating people's lives in an effort to conform mankind into a pre-written plan.  The politician fights this, in an effort to keep his love.

    This is a very hard movie to write a summary for.  And despite a 7 on IMDB, it's actually better than that.  I'd probably put it up to 8.5 or so.
    I wish I could articulate the ideas in this more clearly.  There's a lot about free will, and how it applies to what the Bureau does.  Is it worse to know that your future is dictated?  At first, it's easy to think that it would be horrible.  But then it feels like it might be kind of reassuring, if you know that everything will turn out fine.  What's most comfortable is if we don't know the answer to that question.  If we don't know, we can claim that everything is predetermined, so we can wash our hands of our failures.  We can also believe that we can work our way out of our circumstances, and rise above our state.
    There are some issues, which aren't tackled as clearly as they should be, about the responsibility of the individual.  If the politician (David Norris, played by Matt Damon) opts to continue his relationship with his love, the side effects are made clear.  It will most likely prevent him from becoming President eventually, and he's willing to accept that, but it also will derail his love's future, turning her from a very famous dancer and choreographer to teaching ballet to 6-year-olds.  While her future changes his position, there didn't seem to be any consideration of the rest of the world.  If he isn't President, who would be?  And what kind of impact would that have?

    At the heart of this movie, it's a romance, and it's a strangely appropriate one.  I believe in their relationship.  While I didn't like her style of flirting when they meet on the bus, she becomes a more likable person throughout the movie.

    I think that I understand why there's an audience that didn't like this movie though, and I think it has to do with the means by which the Bureau works.  They use hats as an identifier, allowing them to use doorways around the city as shortcuts between locations.  This never bothered me.  The  nature of the Bureau is supernatural, and vaguely religious.  We aren't supposed to understand how the hats work.
    While this is only the second time I've watched it, I think I'll keep coming back to it every now and then.