Mateo says the baby will bring its own luck, but once complications arise, Johnny confronts him and deals with his own helplessness. He lashes out and accuses Mateo of having plans for his wife.
Mateo loves Sarah, but he loves them all. “I'm even in love with your anger,” he says, his voice rising to a roar and tears growing with each word. “I am in love with everything that lives.”
Despite all the threads of death and pain in this film, I find it comforting. A cry for cleanliness. Sheridan has called it a “love poem” for her family, the city, and that time in his life, and it reminds me of the time I spent there in my twenties, when I lived in Brooklyn. (I looked at an apartment in Hell's Kitchen, with a window facing a gap between buildings and a hole in the door where the lock should have been.) My railroad-style apartment had hardwood floors, a white tin ceiling, and a movie theater nearby. theater and Italian bakeries with accessible windows for ice cream in summer. It also had a bathroom the size of a couch and a view of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Once I moved to Florida, I had to listen to traffic noise to fall asleep.
Since then I have collected books and photographs of the city, but, like Christy, I prefer the photographs I have in my head. Gingerbread ice cream from Peter's on Atlantic Avenue. Talking to a friend on the stairs of the F train for hours. Free movies in Bryant Park behind the library. Walking through Central Park in the summer evening. Gerbera daisies in the winery in spring. The woman in the vintage store watching “Moonstruck” on a small television and saying, “This movie is everyone's family.” The man who was walking home and pointed out a comet in the night sky. Climb the fire escape to the roof to watch the 4th of July fireworks and see three lights of them. Standing on the boardwalk of the Brooklyn Bridge over the East River, feeling the traffic whizzing under my feet.
Not every corner of New York is tinged with magic, although the cement sometimes shines. Not all corners of life have magic either, but like that knock on the door, it is there if you listen. For example, Johnny, the taxi dispatcher, chats with Christy and Ariel on the radio while his father has an audition. How the woman at the ice cream shop where Sarah works keeps an eye on the girls so Johnny and Sarah can have time alone. How my friends recommended jobs to me when I lost mine and how I did laundry when our son was in the hospital. How people at the cancer center chat on HGTV, offer pretzels, and applaud when you ring the doorbell after chemo is over. How bird lovers on social media are now mourning the death of Flaco, the magnificent owl that emerged from the Central Park Zoo that enchanted them with its flights around the city and its hooting from above. How we pitch in when someone needs us, whether they say it or not, and we move forward, greeting our loved ones as we imagine them pedaling across the moon.
Before calling the girls to greet their loved ones, Johnny fears that Frankie's death has broken his spirit. So, Sarah tells him to pretend. “Sometimes I think our whole life is a fantasy,” she says. “Pretend you're happy, Johnny. Please. For the children.”
That is the sublime thing about magic. Sometimes what you pretend to believe becomes real.
