WICKER PARK
Reviewed by Harvey S. Karten
MGM
Grade: C
Directed by: Paul McGuigan
Written by: Brandon Boyce, from Gilles Mimouni film
L' Appartement
Cast: Josh Hartnett, Rose Byrne, Diane Kruger, Matthew Lillard,
Jessica Pare
Screened at: MGM, NYC, 9/1/04
"Love makes people do crazy things" says one character
midway into Paul McGuigan's "Wicker Park" as if anyone in the
audience did not already know this. The crazy things that this
particular woman does go well beyond what any of us would do,
crazed by jealousy though we may be. Or are they? As you sit
through the story scripted by Brandon Boyce and Gilles Mimouni
based on the latter's French film "L'Appartement," you'll
undoubtedly recall how you've been playing the game of love and
calculate to what extent you might work your wiles to get what
you want from the love of your life.
Matthew (Josh Hartnett) is the principal focus of this story of
affection, obsession, jealousy and betrayal, as a young man on
the rise in his firm to such an extent that he is being sent to
Shanghai to close a big deal because the boss has much
confidence in Matthew's ability to sell. The company should have
thought twice, because Matthew never does get on the American
Airlines flight to China because he's madly in love with a beautiful
woman, Lisa (Diane Kruger) with curly blonde hair, a seductive
way of arranging meetings, and most of all with an ability to
disappear from her lover's life–even when she's two feet away
from him in a restaurant's closed phone booth. Though Matthew
believes he is being ditched, in reality another, equally lovely
young lady, Alex (Rose Byrne) is jinxing the match because she
becomes as obsessed with Matt as he is Lisa, thus forming the
eternal triangle.
"Wicker Park" spends a good deal of its one hundred fifteen
minutes keeping us in the audience guessing about how
everything will turn out, yet somehow hoping (thanks to heavy-
lidded Josh Hartnett's sleepwalking through the role) that he'll
wind up with no one. We might even wonder why pretty Alex is
prepared to ditch her far livelier and certainly more interested
boyfriend, Luke (Matthew Lillard).
The movie, filmed only somewhat in the Chicago of the story
but mostly in Montreal, including a Quebec suburb in which the
title Wicker Park is shot, takes place over a two-year period,
most of whose months find both Lisa and Matthew desolate
because each thinks that the other has disappeared from the
intense relationship. The time changes are mighty confusing,
frequent buzzing into the past and present coaxing us to wonder
how things will turn out, but on the whole we're perplexed–not to
say left with open-mouthed disbelief about the enormous
coincidences without which there would be no story.
Hartnett lack the depth to make us believe in his passion, but
director McGuigan goes beyond credibility when he casts Rose
Byrne as a performer in a Shaksperean play on a Chicago stage.
The principal defect is that a plot that features characters who
are head-over-heels in love leaves us with simply an intellectual
guessing game. Since we do not feel the excitement of love that
propels the actions of the four principals, we are left with actors
who are watchable enough but perhaps due to a convoluted
script are not able to engage our emotions.
Rated PG-13. 114 minutes. © 2004 by Harvey Karten at
harveycritic@cs.com
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