The Adjustment Bureau ( 4 out of 5)

Rumor has it that when the original Young Turks of the Cashiers du Cinema gathered years after the fact for a round table discussion one of the topics was with regards to how they had argued so hard towards the director as the artist of his own work that when he was finally given artistic freedom, he didn’t know what to do with it.

That is, in one way or another, the logic behind the Adjustment Bureau as explained by Terrence Stamp’s Thompson in one of those film stealing monologue scenes. It’s that free will is just an illusion. Sure we can chose what tie to wear and what tooth paste to use, but give a person real power over themselves and we get the Dark Ages or World Wars. Thus there is a Chairman who has a plan devised for everyone and when we step off course, he sends his men to give us all a nudge back into fulfilling the destiny that was set out for us.


That’s the story told anyway in the new film of the same name which places Matt Damon and Emily Blunt into, what is essentially an old fashioned melodrama with the ideas surrounding them loosely based on a Phillip K. Dick short story that, just possibly, Alex Proyas also had in mind when he dreamed up his masterpiece Dark City. It’s the foregrounding of this romance that essentially holds the movie together, giving it human momentum within a story that hasn’t been given half as much though by its writer/director George Nolfi as say was given to the aforementioned Dark City or even Inception for that matter, but then again, the old adage still stands: love conquers all.

Damon plays David Norris, a former bad boy turned senate hopeful in New York who looks poised to win until a picture of some former college hijinks is put into print and Norris loses. In the bathroom, before his speech on election night he meets Elise (Blunt) and immediately establishes a connection until she is chased away, no name or number having been given, by a pair of guards looking for her for crashing a wedding upstairs.

Norris, smitten and frustrated, manages a speech that night that is honest and compelling and looks like it will set him on course for a win come next term. Meanwhile, on a bus to his new job, he meets up with Elise and they manage to exchange numbers. However, this wasn’t the plan for Norris who, upon arrival to the office, finds men in suits erasing memories from his co-workers. They give chase but are inescapable. Their hats, we are later told, allow them the power to go through doors and be teleported around the city like magic. It’s a neat trick that doesn’t get much more logical an explanation than this.

Norris is told of this mysterious Chairman and this divine plan that has been written for everyone and is mapped out in convenient animated books which, despite their power, look less impressive and versatile than Ipads. Apparently God hasn’t caught up with the times. But now, reeling myself back in, I’ve gone and made an important assumption that the film wisely doesn’t. These men don’t stand in for angels nor the Chairman for God, although the parallels are there: we know this Chairman, we are told, by many different names and have met him but never know as he appears in a different form to everyone.

The thing is, Norris was never meant to meet Elise and her presence, if a relationship is allowed to develop, will throw both of their destinies off course and will ultimately, if Thompson is to be believed, ruin both of them. Therefore, the agents follow Norris, “nudging” him every once in a while in order to keep him on the fast track to greatness and away from Elise. The logic here though is a bit murky: if the agents need to keep nudging Norris back on track, aren’t they changing also, by doing so, the destinies of those around them, in a Butterfly Effect-like manner, or are there other agents who need to come in and nudge everyone else back on course after an initial nudge? That must require a lot of man power. Maybe in the sequel we can go backstage at the Bureau and see the Chairman going through the recruitment process.

The film is wise in that it doesn’t explicitly draw a religious parallel, which would ultimately ground it in some sort of reality and make it into something it isn’t, although it does suggest a certain spiritual subtext by which Nolfi, on several occasions, films Damon in long shot amidst beautiful, sprawling backgrounds which were, depending on how you look at it, either the design of human artistry or part of an overall destiny in which one small man is passing through.

And then the story ultimately becomes a romantic thriller in which Norris, with the help of one optimistic agent played by Anthony Mackie, tries to avert the agents, who aren’t, in one of the films many little nice touches, so much bad guys as simply men doing their job, and get back to Elise, even if it means changing the course of his entire life. It’s a nice premise for which Damon and Blunt can cast a likable couple that we generally hope find each other and features a world in which chases are handled by foot and not computers and are filmed in long takes and edited with logic not a blender.

And that’s what you get for your money. Here’s a film that is well acted and made and spreads a little bit of logic in with a little bit of illogic. It doesn’t have the sweep of say Inception, but unlike that film is does have an emotional drive towards some sort of foreseeable end point, which makes it not nearly as compelling but engaging for its own simple, earnest reasons. It won’t provide any food for thought that will justifiably leave anyone discussing it several weeks from now but then again, neither did Inception.

Hereafter (5 out of 5)

To believe in the afterlife is not necessarily to believe in God. It is, instead, to believe in anything other than nothing. That is, after all, the reason we believe in anything isn’t it: in hope that, no matter how things are now, there’s always something better just up ahead and around the corner? Some feel that death is what makes life important. If you think about it, depending on where you stand, it’s also what makes life insignificant. We live and then we die. It’s not glamorous. Maybe that’s why we need to believe in something after death: if this is it, most of us would probably demand a refund. That’s one of life’s little contradictions: the reality of death makes us live a little better while it also means that everything we do here is essentially meaningless. Sure, some could leave a timeless legacy behind but, all the same, at the end of the tunnel there’s only one choice and it’s the same for everyone. Hereafter, Clint Eastwood’s newest directorial effort isn’t much more profound than that, which is, so to speak, about as profound as it needs to be.

The film follows three people whose lives are all affected in some way by death. The first is TV newswoman Marie (Cecile de France) who, while vacationing is caught in a tsunami. By the time she washes up on dry land she is assumed dead but jolts back to life after experiencing a blurry vision of shadowed figures shrouded in bright light. The experience leaves her distracted and having visions of a possible afterlife. Her producer/lover tells her to take a break from work and write the book she’s always wanted to. However, so changed is she that her writing and research begins jeering toward exploring the possibilities of an afterlife.

The second is Marcus (played by twin brothers George and Frankie McLaren) who is taken away from his drug addled mother after the accidental death of his twin brother Jason. Put in foster care and seeking some kind of understanding on why his brother, the leader of the two, needed to die, Marcus travels from psychic to psychic, only to be handed cheap entertainment value and no real answers.

The final is George (Matt Damon), a man who, as a child, had a crippling disease which required surgery that left him dead for several moments on the operating table. After his recovery he was plagued by visions of the dead. He was diagnosed as partially schizophrenic and put on pills, which made the visions go away along with just about everything else as well. His brother Billy (Jay Mohr) makes him into a famous psychic until George cannot take it any more, gets a job as a labourer and starts taking cooking classes. Despite Billy’s belief that George should use his gift to help people, a life focused entirely on death is not a life at all to George who believes himself to be cursed by this burden that restricts him from forming any normal, meaningful relationships in his life.

It is then only natural that these three stories will all converge in one way or another. But this isn’t a film driven by plot gimmicks or convenient red herrings. Instead Eastwood and his writer Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon) play it straight, weaving a subtle tapestry that looks at death honestly and thoughtfully. This isn’t a film about spirits or hauntings, it’s a subtle human drama about how death shapes our perceptions of life as Eastwood gently builds up questions about whether or not the afterlife even exists. Is everything a product of chance or fate? Does the ability to communicate with the dead provide proof of Heaven or God or is such an ability just a condition of the mind to begin with?

What is most remarkable about Hereafter is then the subtly yet depth with which Eastwood approaches his material: never resorting to pseudo-philosophy or providing answers to eternally unanswerable questions.

Many people will be turned off by this. The human mind has a natural reflex to instantly fill in the blanks and find artistic meaning in everything. “But what’s the movie about,” many will shout. It’s about one scene. I’ll describe it for you. Despite the fact that, because the movie has no twist or deep mystery to discover, this description hardly constitutes giving away anything important, I’ll still throw out a spoiler alert for those who have not seen the film.

The scene takes place between George and Marcus. George has reluctantly agreed to give the kid a reading in order to contact his brother. George acts as the medium but after a while loses the signal. “Where did he go?” The kids demands. “I don’t know,” replies George. It’s one of those brilliant Clint Eastwood scenes, so subtle that they could be mistaken for nothing and yet are still the heart of the film, concealing such dramatic revelation, in which the faces of two characters, both half obscured by darkness, are intercut. They are physically divided and yet symbolically singled, sharing, for one moment, a common metaphysical bond.

And that’s it, the truth of all three characters: “I don’t know.” That is, after all, to paraphrase Socrates, all we every really know about anything.

The Bourne Ultimatium (5 out of 5)

Considering all my complaining about The A-Team and action films using shakey handheld cameras this week I thought I'd cap my thoughts on the subject off with a my review from a couple years ago of the film that does this style the best and indeed creates intimate and exciting action sequence using a handheld camera and lots of edits.

The Bourne Ultimatum is an exercise in great post-modern filmmaking from a man who has burned his way into our collective conscious as a filmmaker to be reckoned with. It’s a film that means business and doesn’t screw around getting to it. With airtight economy, the plot doesn’t fool with anything it doesn’t need and instead concentrates with intense focus on every detail it has, creating suspense not through over-the-top action (although there is a lot of that), but procedure. There is not one wasted moment in this film. It is lean, mean and to the point; so intensely good in fact that it leaves no room to question its own absurd plot. Most importantly, it is not smug or sly, it doesn’t wink or waste space with nostalgia because its only point of reference is itself. To see the Bourne Ultimatum as the finale of an ongoing narrative is to understand what the previous films were holding back. As a masterpiece of sound and handheld cinematography, of lighting and editing, director Paul Greengrass has single-handedly reinvented the spy-thriller genre. This is one of the year’s best films.

The amnesiac U.S. spy is back for his third outing in the Bourne Ultimatum. Once again Jason Bourne must outsmart CIA agents sent to eliminate him while on a personal quest to find his true identity once and for all. A plot description here would be futile. The plot is no more than a constant back and forth between CIA Deputy Director Noah Vosen (David Strathairn) trying to track Bourne’s every move and Bourne always narrowly escaping.

What is fascinating about the Bourne Ultimatum is how the character of Jason Bourne inhabits his own universe. Bourne, although able to accomplish amazing feats like backing a car off a roof or ramping a motorbike up the side of a wall, is not a showoff. Matt Damon has taken his fair share of critical flack these days, being accused of one-note performances. However it is testament to Damon’s talent that he is able to step outside of his boyish good looks in order to play inert, one-note characters. In the hands of a charmer, Jason Bourne would be a second rate James Bond with no memory.

As played by Damon he is a cold, hard man who takes no pleasure in the acts of violence he must commit. A man of procedure and not action, Bourne gets the job done as efficiently as possible and moves on. And by presenting a man with no memory, the film inverts the typical action hero: Bourne has no back story, no long lost love, no tragic past and no alliance to anyone but himself, freeing the film of clutter to focus on the simplistic heart of the story: a government spy trying to find his true identity. The brilliance of the performance is that, even when Bourne is doing something fantastic, Damon’s acting is completely internal. If Bourne had more than one note, the film would be a mess.

What then makes the Bourne Ultimatum an espionage masterpiece is the starling degree of intensity which Greengrass employs in overseeing that his film mimics the very best traits of its main character: lean, mean and without excess. The Bourne Ultimatum is all business. Much has been debated about Greengrass’ use of a handheld camera, which shakes uncontrollably during action sequences, losing the focus as many would argue. And although I have been against the use of the handheld camera in action films for some time now, Greengrass has found a way to integrate the unstable focus of the machine as an integral part of the filmic experience, making the connection between the audience and Bourne as intimate as ever. This makes for the film’s most important asset. If we have no way of empathizing with Bourne over his self obsessed quest for identity, the film at least goes to great lengths to place us so intimately within Bourne’s universe that empathy becomes superfluous.

By appreciating the necessity of the handheld camera we can begin to see the precise architecture of the film’s action. Greengrass breaks down the ingrained perceptions of cinematic time and space. In delivering short, intense bursts of spastic motion from all angels, the so-called cinematic “fourth wall” becomes extinct, giving the camera a feeling of 360 degree peripheral vision and giving the audience the sensation of being vulnerable from all sides. In doing this, by keeping the action in the moment, by unchaining the camera from its role of passive observer and transforming it into an active participant in the cinematic experience, Greengrass has capture the visual essence of what it must feel like to be in Jason Bourne’s shoes: always on the run, always ready for action from all angels, and always buried under the pressure of needing to make convulsive decisions in split second moments of adrenaline fueled intensity. This is damn electrifying filmmaking.

For all the naysayers, there is no better proof of the film’s brilliant mechanics than in the single most stunning image this or any other action film this year has seen. It is a sequence even more startling than the infamous crane chase in Casino Royale because of both its sheer audacity and intimacy. The sequence requires Jason Bourne to jump off of a roof and through the window of an adjacent building in order to extirpate an assassin who is chasing Nicky Parsons (Julie Stiles). In Greengrass and cinematographer Oliver Wood’s most daring display of keeping the audience as close to the action as possible, just as Bourne makes the jump, the camera jumps with him across the divide between buildings, shooting him from behind on a 45 degree angle looking down. Cut to the reaction shot as Bourne crashes through the window and proceeds to an intense fistfight, shot mostly in close-up, and featuring only diegetic sound. That’s what makes the Bourne Ultimatum so stimulating and to-the-point. It is a film composed with none of the panache and wit of its action counterparts, but rather only nature’s most bare necessities: cold hard sweat and blood.