Here Angels Tread

CAST: Matt Damon,Emily Blunt

Rating: **1/2

A bureau employing largely ordinary men who keep the world running according to the “Plan” of the “Chairman” — that’s the premise of The Adjustment Bureau,a film based on a short story by American science fiction writer Philip K. Dick.

Should anyone drift from that plan,these men — “angels”,if you like — set off “freeze ripples” with a spilled cup of coffee or a missed train,and ensure that you and I are nudged in the direction the man up there wants. It’s all about giving an “appearance of free will” through “change in the way people reason”. Apparently,God — though He/She is not called that — tried free will before and saw Man bring the world to the brink of disaster in “the Bay of Pigs crisis” (a really outdated God,don’t you think?).

The adjustment bureau and its minions seem concerned with one man alone,despite the fact that he seems the least in need of an intervention: US House Representative David Norris (Damon). Elected for the first time at the age of 24,he is now in the running for a Senate seat and galloping towards it by all accounts.

Then,a scandal from youth stops him in the tracks — he mooned as a prank in college — and apparently (despite evidence to the contrary) men who may be senators in distant future are expected to behave better.

Even as he is thinking aloud about his concessional speech in the men’s toilet,who walks out of one of the cubicles but a beautiful ballerina (Blunt)? Now,if that’s not God’s plan,what is? As is the wont of such meetings,these are cut short by Norris’s trusted aide rushing in. Norris takes the bus on his first day to a new job,and who should he find inside but the ballerina again?

However,the Plan doesn’t visualise Norris and ballerina Elise together,for reasons only vaguely explained,and so the adjustment bureau uses threat and kidnapping to convince the wannabe senator that this affair could prove costly.

The idea of fate vs a man’s actions is intelligent,perhaps too intelligent for a Hollywood mainstream film. As the would-be senator and his lady love run down New York’s streets,you can’t help wondering what adjustments the story itself went through,becoming a tale of love,with the Creator himself an insurmountable obstacle in the way.