thoughts on The Adjustment Bureau (spoilers)

A politician named David Norris(Matt Damon) who has just found out that he has lost a Senate race goes to the men's room to collect himself and prepare his concession speech. There, he meets a young woman named Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt), who is hiding from security after crashing a wedding in the same building. The two share an instant connection, and her comments on his political career lead him to give an energized, straight-from-the-hip speech that, months later, has pundits calling him a contender for future Senate races. Unfortunately, because he has to rush off to give this speech and she is being pursued by security, they have to part abruptly, and he assumes that he will never see her again.

He is never supposed to. We later learn that while the Adjustment Bureau (a group of mysterious men in suits and fedoras who make sure that everyone's lives go according to plan) want the two of them to meet so that he will be motivated to give the speech, they never intend for Elise and David to meet again. In fact, after they do (on a bus that David would have missed had the Adjustment Bureau agent following him not dozed off on the job), and after David witnesses members of the bureau making "adjustments," he is let in on the secret that he is to avoid Elise. Oh, and if he tells anyone else about them, the Bureau will "reset" his brain, erasing his memories and personality and leaving his friends and loved ones to think he's gone crazy. Nevertheless, he and Elise cross paths again, and as David continues to pursue a relationship with her, the Bureau must reveal more and more information about themselves-- as well as about David and Elise's intended and possible futures-- to David.

I liked this movie a lot, everyone. Though I left the theater asking myself a few questions about the plot, I found that the movie had answered all of the ones that *could* be answered definitively-- that is, there were no holes, and it seemed, in retrospect, that the plot almost *had* to unfold exactly as it did. This kind of blew my mind. Ultimately, the movie seems to be making two arguments:

1)There is a "plan" for everything that happens in our lives. However, because human beings ultimately *do* have free will, there is no guarantee that everything will go according to that plan. We might have to be nudged/prompted to do the "right" thing; adjustments might have to be made; and, though we might have to fight with every fiber of our being, take enormous risks, and make huge sacrifices to do so, we *can* determine our own fate.

2)Finding and keeping the love of your life requires an almost overwhelming combination of chance; divine intervention; risk; sacrifice; and hard work.

That the movie is able to communicate the second of those two arguments with two characters who have spent an extremely short amount of time together is a huge credit to both the script and the actors. David and Elise hit it off immediately in a way that rarely happens (thought I think many of us hope that it can, and will for us), and Matt Damon and Emily Blunt absolutely sell us that the two have fallen in love and will fight to be together. Of course, for much of the movie, he is the only one who realizes they have to fight; thought I kept wishing she could be let in on the secret sooner than she ultimately is, the script perfectly explains why she can't. David won't tell her unless absolutely necessary because he doesn't want his mind to be erased. The Adjustment Bureau won't tell her unless absolutely necessary because they want as few people as possible to know that they exist. While this was frustrating to me because for much of the movie it seems that she has even less choice in her own fate than David does, the movie seems to be asking the question, how much choice does *anyone* really have?

Ultimately, I really liked the way the movie conceptualized the nature of fate vs. free will. My own thoughts on this are, well, for lack of a better word, complicated. I am past the point where I believe that any one choice determines the course of one's life; I have been at points in my own life where I've felt like I've been off track and managed to "right" myself, and the fact that "righting" myself has been possible seems to indicate that one bad decision or wrong turn isn't going to ruin your life unless you let it. I have also found myself in enough similar situations, making similar decisions over and over again, that I tend to believe that though we may have choices, there are just certain ones we are most likely to make in given situations. To me, this indicates that it's often silly to wonder what life would have been like if you'd done things differently; you probably wouldn't have done things differently. And yet. There have been so many things in my life that have had to line up *just perfectly* to happen in a certain way that it's hard to believe that it's all just random. Who knows? What I do know is that if I leave the theater thinking about the questions that a movie poses rather than being critical of the movie itself, it was a good movie.