The Adjustment Bureau | Madison Square Park — the block where the plan first slipped

David Norris lives at Madison Avenue and East 24th Street, and the park across the road is where the Bureau's whole scheme comes apart. An agent is supposed to spill coffee on a sleeping man at 7:05 to make him miss a bus. The agent falls asleep himself. David catches the bus, meets Elise again by pure accident, and a case file that had been running smoothly for decades goes off the rails.

Madison Square Park is six and a half acres of dead-flat Manhattan greenery, and it is the perfect stage for that kind of small, decisive failure — a place where thousands of tiny near-misses happen every morning and nobody notices. The Metropolitan Life Tower's clock face keeps time above the London planes on the east side. The Flatiron Building holds the southern corner. Dogs, chess, a permanent queue at the Shake Shack in the northeast corner.

Sit on a bench facing Madison Avenue around seven in the morning and watch people run for buses they will just barely make. The film's premise is that someone somewhere is keeping score of exactly that. It is a hard idea to shake once you are looking for it.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.