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August 05, 2011

The Audacity Bureau

Rick McGinnis reviews The Adjustment Bureau (new to DVD), a Matt Damon vehicle nominally based on Adjustment Team, a story by Philip K. Dick.

Matt Damon plays a young politician who meets a pretty dancer (Emily Blunt) on the night of his first major electoral defeat. Before he can see her again, however, he discovers that a shadowy supernatural agency is conspiring to thwart their romance as part of a master plan that’s supposed to put him in the White House – a fate that he’ll sabotage if his hunger for political power is blunted by mere romantic fulfillment.

Maybe it’s just the presence of Damon, looking like yet another actor taking an imaginative dry run at a political career, but the film comes off like a relic from the early Obama era, when so much faintly hysterical hope and idealism still stuck to a man who turned out to be a plodding and substanceless ideologue.

Much more at the link (including a review of the new Das Boot Two-Disc Collector's Set, a much better investment).

The key figures here are Emily Blunt and Barack Obama. By the end of act one we are (re)introduced to Matt Damon's ego, posing dramatically in the men's washroom of a posh hotel, rehearsing a noble concession speech for a failed Senate bid. This mawkish, self-congratulatory wank is underlined again and again throughout the film. Damon portrays a politician not like other politicians, a solar-panel guy who puts true love before success in politics, the closest Damon's identity politics will allow him to playing the role of a certain heroic senator from Illinois.

It is a grotesque wobbling mess of a film. Yet a redeemer appears, this being Emily Blunt. While I would have been happier to watch her read the phone book (or its networked equivalent) for a couple hours, I was nonetheless happy to endure the audacity of Damon to get to the good bits. Think of it as porn and you are good to go.

Groundwork: Thanks to the miracle of the interweb, and lapsed copyright, Philip K. Dick's Adjustment Team, first published in Orbit Science Fiction, Sept-Oct 1954, No.4 with illustration by Faragasso, is available online.

Posh totty: Emily Blunt cover shoot for Vogue.

Posted by Ghost of a flea at August 5, 2011 08:14 AM