Dicking Around

Charlie Sheen can rant about tiger's blood until his face turns blue, but he's a pussy compared to Philip K. Dick. The visionary novelist and short story writer (1928-1982) was a notorious pill-head who averaged one marriage for every decade of his life. A prophet of paranoia and meta-reality, the author spent his final eight years on the planet processing hallucinations he attributed to a divine cosmic intelligence he called VALIS. No mere Vatican assassin, he became convinced that he was a 1st-century Christian named Thomas—the target of Roman oppression—or, variously, under the spirit possession of the Old Testament prophet Elijah.

Nearly 40 years later, it might seem that just about every word Dick typed (and he typed a gazillion of them) has been optioned for or inspired a movie, miniseries, opera, comic book, rock album, video game, trans-fat-free snack or 3D holographic installation—you name it. Only William S. Burroughs can claim as much hipster cachet as a one-size-fits-all generator of cultural phenomena, underpinning everything from cyberpunk to postmodern philosophy.

Of course, not all of said cultural phenomena makes for great shakes, since Dick's fiction was more about ideas than literary flourish. Ridley Scott first established the writer as a cinematic template in 1982 with Blade Runner (adapted from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), still the most celebrated and influential of Dick adaptations, if compromised enough in its vision that the director has repeatedly recut and reissued the film in different versions over the decades. Nonetheless, Dick's dystopian speculations offer challenges that agitate the right sort of filmmaker in creatively rewarding ways. Though flawed by a weak third act, Minority Report is one of Steven Spielberg's best films (especially for Spielberg haters). A Scanner Darkly, Richard Linklater's second rotoscoped feature (after Waking Life), finds a clever parallel for Dick's fascination with split personalities and shadow spirits in the animation process, a technique whose optical tremors could make viewers feel a bit druggy themselves.

Based on a short story published in the September-October 1954 issue of "Orbit Science Fiction," The Adjustment Bureau is never really Dickish enough to count as a significant part of the canon. The film makes use of its fantastical premise: Human affairs are overseen and manipulated by teams of supernatural beings who periodically "adjust" peoples' lives to keep them on track with the cosmic game plan. On one particular morning, the system falters and a mere mortal stumbles onto an adjustment in process. (It mostly involves freezing bodies in place while they get vacuum cleaned). A freak-out ensues, and matters are dealt with, although the often-divorced author makes a punch line out of a nagging wife. Director George Nolfi (screenwriter of Ocean's Twelve and The Bourne Ultimatum) doesn't so much take liberties with the story—there's not much there to start with—as use it as a launching pad for a sci-fi rom-com thriller whatzit.

The movie is disposable junk that we'll all be watching on cross-country flights by summer, but it punches so many buttons that it disarms through sheer vigor. Matt Damon is David Norris, a hotshot Senate candidate from Red Hook whose falls to defeat after an old photo of a drunken "mooning" incident turns up, his bare ass splashed across a full page of a New York tabloid. (A silly notion in this day and age, but this is science fiction). While rehearsing his concession speech in a fancy hotel men's room, he meets-cute with a willowy redhead named Elise (Emily Blunt), who has been hiding in a stall. (Like I said: science fiction). They fall in love instantly. And just as instantly, veer off on their separate tangents, never to meet again. Only they do, the very next day, because one of the adjusters (played by Anthony Mackie) falls asleep on the job and lets fate take its own course. As mentioned, Damon later wanders into an adjustment at his new consulting job. Mad Men's John Slattery—dressed, like all the adjusters, in a fedora and dark suit, as if he just walked over from his hit show—warns him that not only can he never see Elise again, but if he reveals anything to anyone about the "Bureau," they'll vacuum-clean his brain.

Yeah, right. Like Jason freaking Bourne is going to let a bunch of meddlesome dudes in Don Draper drag tell him what to do. The next hour juxtaposes romantic interludes with chase scenes and cosmological explications that mash up elements from Wings of Desire-cum-City of Angels (the grumpy adjusters always chill at the New York Public Library), Stranger Than Fiction, Vanilla Sky, 1930s screwball romances, and that Bourne trilogy, since Damon never stops running. While the star-crossed leads are never less than passionate and full-blooded, this is the kind of movie that establishes the characters' reality in broad, superficial strokes. Their conviction seems out of scale and therefore phony. Meanwhile, the actors who are in the genre flick whirring around Damon and Blunt—including Terence Stamp as a celestial heavy you might call "The Exterminating Angel"—make the silliness as fun as it ought ot be. They're in on the joke.

Nolfi is, too. The movie doesn't care about what extraterrestrial big band leader Sun Ra once described as "the prospects for altered destiny." It exists so that cameras can map all sorts of postcard-ready New York City locations (downtown Manhattan's skyline, as viewed from the Red Hook piers, looks enchanting), and so that the rebel angel played by Mackie can show off the nifty door trick. (The adjusters move from one location to another by passing through doors that serve as wormholes). As in Lost, all roads lead to the infinite, but even divine intervention can’t keep two lovers apart. Hollywood endings, though, never had a place in Dick's universe.

Posted by ahillis at March 6, 2011 2:54 PM