Moviegoing:
The Adjustment Bureau
At the beginning of George Nolfi’s The Adjustment Bureau, David Norris (Matt Damon) is a rising young politico who’s all set to win one of New York’s Senate seats. No sooner has this been established then David’s campaign is torpedoed by the publication of a photograph of him mooning his classmates at a college reunion. As the dismal returns come in on election night, David retreats from the ballroom at the Waldorf to the men’s room, to compose his concession speech. Eventually a young woman (Emily Blunt) emerges from one of the stalls. She and David are instantly simpatico. You can tell from their banter that they belong together, and it is not surprising that they come together in a long kiss. But David has a speech to make, and before he kind find out anything about the girl, she’s capering off, with hotel security at her heels. David returns to the ballroom and gives a speech that puts his political future back on track.
Later in the movie, we will learn that Elise, the girl in the bathroom, was put there according to The Plan. Originally, in fact, she was intended to be David’s great love, but the Plan was changed, it seems, when the Planner (be patient with me) grasped that, while a dash of Elise might inspire David to make a boffo speech, a constant diet of her company would make him fat and happy, scuttling his ambitions and the prizes for which the Plan intended them. That’s why the gents from the Adjustment Bureau  — call them angels, call them agents of fate, but don’t try too hard to figure out what they are; this is just a movie — intervene when David bumps into Elise on a Broadway bus and gets her name and phone number. David was never supposed to get on that bus. He was supposed to have coffee spilled on his shirt as he crossed Madison Square Park on his morning commute, obliging him to go back home for a change, thereby missing an Adjustment Bureau intervention at the offices of his best friend, campaign manager, and new boss, a hedge fund manager called Charlie Traynor (Michael Kelly). But an adjuster who is unprofessionally sympathetic to David (Anthony Mackie) slips up, and fails to arrange for the spill. The upshot is that David gets a look, as one of the adjusters (John Slattery) puts it, behind a curtain that he didn’t know existed.
The Adjustment Bureau  is not going to please everybody — not right away. It’s going to take some viewers time and effort to see through the film’s jazzy surface to the mythic romance beneath. And even then, they may feel that mythic romance is wasted on David and Elise, not because they’re individually unworthy but because together they will probably  make a pair of mushy lovebirds.
So whether or not you find The Adjustment Bureau satisfying is going to depend a lot on how able Mr Damon and Ms Blunt are to convince you that the characters they’re playing are consumed by longing — an undertaking that is greatly handicapped by the snappy worldliness with which this vital couple meets the world. It has been decreed by The Plan that David will move from Congress to the Senate to the White House, while Elise will blossom into the finest choreographer of her generation. Mr Nolfi asks us, in effect, to believe that old-fashioned true love could resign his two sharp cookies to careers more mediocre than stellar. The actors left no doubt in my mind that they would.
The movie’s other hurdle is the Adjustment Bureau itself — another quirky artefact from the mind of Philip K Dick. The Bureau is presented as an old-fashioned big-time insurance company, with lofty lobbies, hushed corridors, and mahogany doors. It is constituted exclusively by men who wear not only suits but fedoras — it turns out that the agents’ power actually comes from wearing the hats. Surely this no longer evokes the image of Daddy that it once did, and I wonder how much trouble Mr Nolfi is going to get into for playinig the Bureau scenes as though they were set in the 1940s. I expect that young men who see his picture will be tempted to try to rationalize his metaphysics, implausible as they are. (I wish that their cerebrations could be dealt with by adjuster Terence Stamp’s trademark understated menace.) I sat back and enjoyed the show, which consisted primarily of walking through doorways into entirely unexpected spaces; in the run-up to the climax, David, wearing one of those hats, leads Elise through a doorway at the courthouse and onto the field at Yankee Stadium, with Liberty Island the next stop. It’s visually stunning stuff that only a killjoy would sniff at.
 The current of heroic myth runs very strong in this movie. It’s a current of stories, not meanings. The Magic Flute and Die Frau ohne Schatten both came to mind, as David and Elise embraced possibly for the last time, determined not to live without their love. So did the story of Orpheus. I don’t mean to suggest that The Adjustment Bureau is an important motion picture. It’s much too early to tell how celebrated and cherished the Planner intends it to be.
What’s this? Manohla Dargis likes this movie too? That has never happened! That we agree, I mean. And I swear that I wrote this page before reading hers, discovering that she deploys “torpedo” in the very same way.