I know; it would have taken the courage required to land at Normandy Beach even to have gone into a development meeting with the idea. But Ebert is right about “The Adjustment Bureau” – it’s a romantic comedy trapped inside existential hokum, and it was an audience rights violation not to let it out. This could have been one of the films of the decade — the paranoid screwball comedy that “A Scanner Darkly” never was — but instead we got Sisyphus in a grey flannel suit. Imagine a movie that gives John Slatterly its best lines and then keeps him out of the conclusion and you understand how this happened, or didn’t happen.
Still, “The Adjustment Bureau” is worth seeing for how simple banter can create a sexual force field between characters played by actors as seemingly ill-matched as Matt Damon and Emily Blunt. David Thomson wrote a column for Salon almost 10 years ago about the death of talk as seduction in the movies, as good a thing as he has ever written. It begins:
What was the last movie you saw in which people fell in love because of the way they talked? I don’t mean simply to each other, but the way they used words, and how that usage reflected on such things as spirit and soul, as well as knowledge and experience. I mean the saving interplay of sadness and humor; the poetic grace or fancy that can deliver a compliment better than a caress. I mean an essential tenderness toward the cadence and sound of language — let syntax look after itself sometimes. Much as, early on in a relationship, we might only want to make love to and with the other person, surely words will have their hour and their lifetime. Marriage, I suggest, or partnership, depends on how urgently and wittily people continue to talk to each other. It is, if you like, the difference between saying (in the middle of a night or the middle of a relationship), “The field marshal sometimes forgets what he wanted to say when standing at attention,” and facing the blunt bathroom wall advertisement “9 inches of hot metal. Fucks forever.”
And I think I’m correct in saying that what gets most of us around the bases isn’t mere attraction or sexual urge. It’s the talk that makes a path, the feeble jokes, the better one; all couples need to learn humor. I am hesitant in raising education, but even “9 inches” will never face a greater need for schooling than finding ways to woo, or finding arguments to open some intransigent entrance. (Just call him or her “an intransigent entrance” — it’s so unexpected — and you may be halfway home.) I don’t guarantee it, but the thing most people are most denied in life is not actually sex or orgasm — we help ourselves. It’s being well talked to, in a way that persuades you the other person wants to know you. Never forget the second word in “carnal knowledge.”
He goes on to praise, of all things, “Notting Hill” as a prime example of the power of repartee, which of course makes sense when you remember how unlikely a couple Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant would make. What Thomson had not seen before writing this piece was the ravishingly famished look in Emily Blunt’s eyes in this film; she looks as if she’s going to devour Damon and jump inside him all at once. Ferocity doesn’t begin to describe the sexuality of her performance, sharpened all the more by Damon doing a very good Jimmy Stewart, deadpan wittiness just falling out of his mouth and surprising both of them.
“The Adjustment Bureau” would have us believe that its leading couple were always meant to be together, and that’s why they’re so instantly at ease with each other — that it’s the resonance of God’s plan they are vibrating to. Within 30 seconds of hearing them simply talk to (and bait) each other, you know they’re creating their own plan, one they have been hungering for all their lives. Seldom has a script been so at war with itself, like Preston Sturges was on the rewrite committee with the Wachowskis.
(Image credit: 4rilla/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)
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A lot of people hate the ending of the new “True Grit.” I loved it without immediately knowing why, other than that it made my head snap back; it was like finishing an opera with an unadorned solo sung by a child, lit by a single spotlight. Without it, the rest of the movie is enough, although nothing like the glimpse into hell its trailer promised. With it, the film becomes an argument with God, with how He has made us and the world. You understand what a weak force memory is, and how necessarily careless human beings can be with even the most vivid experiences. Time’s arrow runs one way, and it is so difficult — a denial of life — to attend to anything that has happened in the past. You knew that going into the film; you’re not liable to forget it coming out.
The ending is a fast-forward of about 25 years, from the 1870s and the 14-year-old girl Maddie Ross, a girl with astonishing promise, who has just had the adventure of anyone’s lifetime, to the turn of the century and the verging-on-old-maid Maddie Ross, puckered as a pickle. Spinster Maddie has heard that the man who saved her life, Marshall Ruben Cogburn, is now with a traveling circus, performing feats of marksmanship. She hasn’t seen him in a quarter-century — she never saw him again after he rode her through the night to safety; she travels to see him, but finds out upon arrival that he died three days before. She arranges to have his body transported back with her to Arkansas, to be buried in her family’s plot. She makes the decision alone, as she has all her decisions; there was no prior agreement as she and Cogburn had in the original “True Grit” movie, which gives that film’s finish sweet tears and closure. You next see her staring at his headstone, snow swirling down, her anger vivid, even on a face already abused by anger and unmet aspiration. Then she turns and marches off through a barren field into the snow, rationalizing her regret. Her last line: “Time just gets away from everybody, I guess.”
So many regrets. Of never thanking the man who had saved her life. Of the constraints of a woman’s life in the last half of the 19th century in the United States. A brilliant girl who today would be voted by her class most likely to become president — a girl with street smarts, a punishingly logical mind, stunning oratorical skills, and bottomless drive and courage — became nothing but another spinster, a woman unsuited for marriage, the one thing available to her in her time. Her talents have been wasted, her honesty and lack of tact likely turned against her in what likely became a crushingly ordinary life.
This enough would be occasion for tears, too, at the poignancy and waste. There’s something more, though. Our emotions are not sympathy, but self-recognition. Even today, when the 19th century’s sense of time and distance have been obliterated, forgetfulness has not. Youth has not. Youth is about looking forward, not holding on, not attending. She couldn’t Facebook with Marshall Cogburn, but she could have attended to him, somehow, once, in those 25 years. But of course she didn’t, and of course we wouldn’t have, either. We are young, and then that slips away, and so much with it, because we weren’t paying attention.
The clarity that narrative fast-forwarding seems to generate is always a cheat; even when it satisfies, as in Edward P. Jones’ “The Known World,” it’s the spectacle of the author’s continued mastery over his characters that’s satisfying, not the logic of the specific ends to which he or she puts them. (Or, often, it’s just a cheap shocker; think of the ending — admittedly butchered — of “The Magnificent Ambersons.”) But this time is different. This time, the subject is time, and how we unfold within it. It’s an act of philosophy or renegade theology. Stanley Fish is right to note the Calvinism of the film’s world, but wrong to argue that the film itself is a Calvinist argument. (He thinks that the Iris Dement version of “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” that closes the film is about Maddie’s unwavering faith in God; I think it’s about the arms of Cogburn, which clutched her throughout her rescue.) The Coens show the world God has created — random in its grace — and then, through their ending, argue with Him about that world, or at least dissent at its cold embrace. A fantastic choice.
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