There’s
all kinds of stuff to love about this movie, but I think what keeps me coming
back is the interactions between the different members of the family. When the Sullivans arrive in America, they’ve
been heavily knocked about by tragedy, and while each is dealing with it in
their own way, there’s no way for any of them to get through it without leaning
on each other (some spoilers.)
I
wouldn’t say the film precisely centers
around the kids, but it does often view the family through them, so we’ll start
there. Christy, the young narrator,
considers herself the family protector. As the older sister, she naturally spends a
lot of time looking after Ariel – explaining things to her, comforting her when
she’s upset, finding ways to distract her when something troubling is happening
– but in her mind, she looks after her parents a lot, too. As a believer in magic wishes, she uses her
allotted three on the family’s behalf, relying on their “power” to get the
family out of difficult situations.
Little
sister Ariel isn’t nearly so wrapped up in duty. As the youngest, she’s the least aware of the
family’s worries and the least affected by her brother Frankie’s death. That’s least
affected, not unaffected – it’s clear, when a family friend is unable to
comfort her with the platitude that “going to heaven” and “going home” are the
same thing, that the loss has touched her as well. It comes out in small ways here and there,
but for the most part, Ariel is simply resilient and adaptable to the new world
in which she finds herself. She takes
pleasure in simple things, and while she too thinks she can help through magic
(such as with the “healing powers” in the lemon drops she gives Sarah,) it’s
more about the older members of the family going along with it for her sake,
whereas Christy never seeks reassurance about the magic she employs on the
family’s behalf.
Sarah,
the mother, is often the soother, the one smoothing things over when the seas
get choppy. She finds games for the
girls to distract them from their troubles and alternately comforts Johnny when
he’s spinning out and gets in his face when he lets the kids see his
fears. She holds stubbornly to hope,
optimism as a battle cry, even as she’s still reeling from the death of her
son. She’s the one who most overtly
pretends to be happy.
That
leaves us with the father Johnny. Of the
four, he has the most tenuous handle on things.
He swallowed his grief, and now the sadness and fear he can’t express
looks like numbness, occasionally bursting out in fits of anger. He struggles to be the provider, getting the
family what they need any way he knows how, and he buckles when Sarah or the
girls intimate that that sort of providing isn’t enough; they also need an
emotional availability that he no longer knows how to foster.
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