There is a classic thought experiment regarding choice in which a man is in a building about to be bulldozed. Every room in the building has several doors. Just before each section is bulldozed, he manages to find the right door to the next section and does so repeatedly until he escapes the house. However, suppose all the doors the man did not choose were locked. Does it make sense to say he had a choice, i.e. the ability to freely choose between x and y?
That thought experiment is designed to show us that the concepts of choice, free will, and determinism--and how they relate--aren't as simple and clear as we would like to believe. Unfortunately for its audience, The Adjustment Bureau isn't interested in provoking that sort of thought or discussion.
In the film, David Morse is running for Senate. As his prospects begin to fade, he enters the hotel's restroom to rehearse his concession speech and meets a woman named Elise. Their attraction and conversation inspires David to abandon his prepared remarks and give an honest and unscripted address to his supporters, which is received with great enthusiasm and makes him the favorite for the nomination in the following Senate cycle.
What David does not know is that this meeting was arranged by a group calling itself the "Adjustment Bureau," whose Chairman--read: God--and caseworkers interfere with human dealings to ensure things go according what they call "the Plan."
A deterministic framework in which free agents exist is a classic compatibilistic take on the concept of choice. Unfortunately, the film only superficially deals with much of the consequences of this treatment of choice. The most the film ever touches on the day-to-day complications of "adjusting" a deterministic system, for example, is a scene involving an Adjustment Bureau caseworker forcing taxi drivers to avoid David and the film commits the cinematic sin of telling us the consequences rather than showing them.
This is especially unfortunate because the film does, at points, suggest the writers were up to the task of grappling with the consequences of that position. Consider the concept of divine foreknowledge of one's actions, for example. It's obviously a necessary property to manage a deterministic system. However, its existence implies human beings aren't exceptional in the universe, they're merely deluded links in the chain of causality. The film gets around that by telling us--again, with the telling--that the caseworkers don't really have foreknowledge, they merely have a sort of sixth sense for what people will do and when and can anticipate it and interfere with it. (This plus for the film is, in a way, blunted by the fact that the caseworkers have a literal scheme of the plan, which instantly updates to reflect the impact of choices on the scheme, and the fact that it never addresses whether the Chairman has foreknowledge of our actions.)
Good points like that are almost completely negated by other choices the writers make. For instance, we are told that chance is a variable in the system. This helps the writers explain away David's tragic childhood without directly implicating--and thus vilifying--the caseworkers, with whom, in at least one case, we are clearly meant to sympathize. Unfortunately, it also greatly weakens the entire concept of the film. Is this a universe in which there are several possible and foreseeable outcomes to any given course of action and the adjusters just nudge people into the streams they find useful or is this a universe in which things just happen?
The biggest sin of all, however, falls at the feet of the ending. (Obviously, the rest of this is going to contain spoilers.) As the thought experiment at the beginning of the diary points out, the absence of coercion does not necessarily mean we are free. Given that, and that the nature of the Chairman is never revealed, a smarter and more honest film would treat even the happy ending we get here--Matt Damon gets the girl, of course--with ambiguity as to whether or not it really is a happy ending. In the framework of the film, winding up with Elise is the same as escaping the house in our thought experiment, but it isn't necessarily a happy ending for those of us who like to believe we're free to choose.
For these reasons, I find The Adjustment Bureau to be the most disappointing kind of film. Rather than being an interesting film whose reach exceeds its grasp, it turns out to be a standard film that avoids examining things closely enough to trouble viewers and damage its marketability.