A charismatic young politician campaigning for the New York Senate has a chance encounter with a ballet dancer. The attraction is immediate; they banter as though they’ve known each other for years. For a man so resigned to having his personality, anecdotes, and attire focus group-tested for mass appeal, here’s a stranger who instinctively understands exactly who he is, and can call him out when he’s pretending to be someone he’s not. Their meet-cute is short-lived, yet indelible. He’ll wake up the next morning thinking of her. He’ll spend far longer hoping to run into her again. He will.
Sweeping romances aren’t really one of sci-fi novelist Philip K. Dick’s pet concerns. Instead, the author’s short stories and novels deal heavily in conspiracies, the concept of reality as nothing more than an elaborate illusion, surveillance, a pervasive sense of paranoia, and a lone individual who finds himself pitted against a powerful corporation. While these themes do recur in The Adjustment Bureau, loosely adapted from Dick’s 1954 short story Adjustment Team, the 2011 film trades the terror of a man discovering he’s walked into a “de-energized” office — a process that makes his colleagues appear gray, drained of life, their bodies crumbling into ash — for the tragedy of a couple who finds out that the shadowy organization behind such reality-altering manipulations is intent on separating them.
