Guess I should write this up now after the "The Family Stone" experience. I recently watched about the last hour of it on HBO and found the concept interesting, even if the ending was predictably typical Hollywood. And as I caught the first half hour today and watched most of it to the end, I've seen the whole film.
And as a 2011 movie, I'm in danger of being up-to-date on something! Or not.
When I watched the last hour of the movie – which was the intriguing part; if I had watched from the beginning, I would have changed channels – I admitted that I do have to give Hollywood credit for stretching the imagination. Of pushing our minds into thinking about the possibilities, rather than just accept physical life and reality as it presents itself.
After seeing the whole film and putting all the pieces together, I'm not quite so impressed, but there are things worth mentioning.
Basically, heaven, or the heavenly realm, is portrayed as a corporate bureaucracy. God is referred to as "the chairman". Angels, members of the adjustment bureau, are heaven's acting agents on earth and they dress in suits and have wage scales and just do their jobs. Heaven itself is a corporate office building.
On one hand, I want to say this portrayal of heaven is not very imaginative, but on the other hand I want to recognize that maybe the filmmaker is saying something about our current times.
Heaven isn't, in fact, a corporate bureaucracy, but as corporations basically dominate everything on our planet today, it's saying this is the model we can all (sadly) relate to today. If this film was made in China a thousand years ago or during the Roman Empire, the setting would be of a different paradigm. Heavens are changing paradigms, as is any concept of "God".
Anyway, there is a God and the chairman has a plan for humankind and it's written out in magical books that all of the "angels" of the adjustment bureau have which tracks out timelines of possible events and futures.
The adjustment bureau "angels" (and their thuggish corporate goons) influence events in the earthly realm to occur according to the plan. If an event goes off plan, they intervene to put things back on track. They're part Twilight Zone, part Men in Black, part their own thing. They don't curtail freewill, per se, but just give humans encouragement to make the right decisions.
It all goes wrong with the two main subjects in this film, who meet and fall in love. But their love is against the plan, so the adjustment bureau sets out to correct the situation. But it's not so easy to keep soulmates apart. Because in the current version of the plan, they have separate destinies. But in previous versions of the plan, things were different, and some things aren't so easily simply erased.
There's an interesting metaphysical realm to this film whereby the adjustment bureau can transport themselves in the earthly physical realm using doorways, which to them are substrates to other disjunct places in the physical realm to help them execute their duties.
It's a play on reality and ideas of fate and destiny. Is destiny a prison that we are locked into by some universal "god", or are we really making our own decisions of where we go and how we end up?
It's not that deep, it's sophomorical, and I'd barely pass this film with a nominal fresh 6 out of 10 tomatoes. I recommend it to people who are numbed to accepting Hollywood films as entertainment. A date and then go have dessert afterwards with a discussion that doesn't touch on the movie.
It's not that deep, it's sophomorical, and I'd barely pass this film with a nominal fresh 6 out of 10 tomatoes. I recommend it to people who are numbed to accepting Hollywood films as entertainment. A date and then go have dessert afterwards with a discussion that doesn't touch on the movie.
