Film Review | The Adjustment Bureau

Hold on to Your Hats

by Thomas Delapa


Science fiction fans, heed the warning: Whatever you do, don’t confuse The Adjustment Bureau with Blade Runner. Though both films evolved from Philip K. Dick stories, only the now-classic Blade Runner is the real deal. Now showing (likely briefly), The Adjustment Bureau is but a sci-fi replicant, and a dull, maladjusted one at that.

A Bourne Identity without an identity, The Matrix without any cool tricks, Bureau features a hollow, bottom-drawer performance by Matt Damon. He plays David Norris, a budding, post-partisan U.S. Senate candidate from New York who has a close encounter with a dapper band of supernatural conspirators. Do we humans have free will, or are we simply meat puppets blind to the strings of predestined fate?

Like last year’s Inception, this is one of those sci-fi fantasies that is constantly explaining—and breaking—its own rules, partly to gloss over the filmmakers’ own inability to make sense of them. To his befuddled consternation, David discovers that his life is rigged, presided over by a shadowy bunch of fedora-clad men in black assigned to make sure he fatefully follows the Big Picture. If humans—or at least good-looking elites like Damon—don’t follow the plan, the Adjusters step in and press the reset button. God forbid, don’t call these guys guardian angels; they’re secularized “case officers.”

Trouble is, David obstinately doesn’t get it. Like Toto, he accidentally sneaks a peak behind the curtain, and sees Richardson (Mad Men’s John Slattery) and the Adjusters at work futzing with the future. David truly goes “off plan” when he insists on chasing after a pretty ballerina, Elise (Emily Blunt), whom he meets by chance—maybe—and is convinced is his soul-mate.

Though writer/director George Nolfi transparently calibrates the film with wistful themes of true love and noble sacrifice, the chemistry between Blunt and Damon hardly registers on the molecular scale. Most in the sketchy cast act like stick figures, mouthing wooden dialogue that sounds like something out of a dim Star Trek episode. Only Terence Stamp, as an ominous high-level Adjuster, raises the stakes, but he’s a momentary blip amidst the low-grade storytelling.

Nolfi’s silly finale might be subtitled “Run for Your Wife,” as Damon makes a mad, marathon dash through the streets and skyscrapers of Manhattan, sporting one of those dopey fedoras. He first must rescue the fatally flabbergasted Elise, as well as find a way to outrun his fate.

Hollywood marketing plans to the contrary, I predict that most human audiences will exercise their free will and walk away from the pedestrian Adjustment Bureau.

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3/8/11

Film Review | Young Victoria

It’s not easy being queen

by Thomas Delapa


This is not your father’s Queen Victoria. Nor even your grandfather’s. The teen monarch of Young Victoria is hardly Victorian--sniff--at least not in the stuffy, we-are-not-amused sense of the word.

In this handsomely mounted but breezy chronicle of the early years of Victoria’s epic reign on the British throne, actress Emily Blunt abdicates pomp and circumstance in favor of a humanized portrait that doesn’t bow to the faded conventions of the historical biopic.

In the crowded gallery of recent royals, Young Victoria sits somewhere between Cate Blanchett’s lauded Elizabeth and Kirsten Dunst’s laughable Marie Antoinette, with all three head and shoulders below Hellen Mirren’s Oscar-winning The Queen. At their own risk, director Jean-Marc Vallee and screenwriter Julian Fellowes curiously gloss over the major events in Victoria’s reign--um, like her coronation--while Enquiring into her private life, principally her courtship and marriage to Prince Albert (Rupert Friend) of Germany. What Vallee gains in intimacy and Victorian secrets, he loses in depth and grandeur.

Blessed with courtly diction and a winsome demeanor, Blunt is the Vallee’s crowning attraction, especially when poised in the plush costumes and an array of palatial interiors from Lincoln Cathedral to London’s Lancaster House. In a supporting role, Paul Bettany stands out as Lord Melbourne, the shrewd Whig leader who becomes Victoria’s confidante once she ascends to the throne in 1837.

In a whirlwind 100 minutes, Vallee and Fellowes barely scratch the surface of a momentous reign that lasted longer than any other in British history, and one that saw England evolve (and downsize) from industrial empire into modern, 20th-century nation. What we do learn, rather fitfully, is that teen Victoria was at the center of a power play between volatile King William (Jim Broadbent) and Victoria’s manipulative mother (Miranda Richardson) and sinister uncle (Mark Strong), with distant uncle King Leopold (Thomas Kretschmann) of Belgium more than interested spectator. At issue is whether Victoria will duly take the crown at 18, or whether she will only nominally serve while her mother and uncle act as “temporary” regents. “Do you ever feel like you’re a chess piece?” she transparently asks the smitten Albert during their own game.

While satisfying on visual level, as drama Young Victoria is a stalemate. Fellowes often proclaims the obvious, yet seems to turn up his nose at nuance. He does only a passable job untangling all the political machinations afoot, such as the tempest-in-a-teapot that brews when the Queen refuses to dismiss her Whig ladies-in-waiting with the election of Tory leader Robert Peel as prime minister. While seemingly trivial today, the act almost brought down the House (of Commons).

In their quest to popularize this young, romantic Victoria, the filmmakers anoint the production with a king’s ransom of majestic eye candy. But calorie counters need not fret: Perhaps owing to Sarah Ferguson’s role as producer, this is assuredly Victoria Lite.

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