by Mark Gabrish Conlsn • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
At 9 p.m. last night I ran
us a DVD from the extensive backlog of items I’ve acquired over the years: Wicker
Park, a 2004 U.S.-Canadian
co-production (the exteriors were shot in Chicago, where the story takes place,
but the interiors were shot in Québec and many of the below-the-line personnel
had French names) and a vehicle for Josh Hartnett during his brief run at
stardom. This was three years after what should have been his star-making role in the 2001 Michael
Bay Pearl Harbor, and it’s clear MGM and
their co-producers, Lakeshore Entertainment, were pushing him as the star
attraction: he’s billed above the title on the DVD (and in the film’s opening
credits as well — back when movies still had opening credits!) while his co-stars, Rose Byrne,
Matthew Lillard and Diane Kruger, are below the title. Wicker Park was based on a 1996 French film called The
Apartment (a title the U.S.
filmmakers probably decided not to use because it would have caused confusion
with Billy Wilder’s 1960 film The Apartment, starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine), and
the writing credits list Gilles Mimouni as writer of the original French film
as well as Brandon Boyce for adapting it into the script for this one. From the
online synopsis at imdb.com — “Matthew (Josh
Hartnett), a young advertising executive in Chicago, puts his life and a
business trip to China on hold when he thinks he sees Lisa (Diane Kruger), the
love of his life who walked out on him without a word two years earlier,
walking out of a restaurant one day. With a little help from his friend Luke
(Matthew Lillard), Matthew obsessively and relentlessly tracks Lisa down and
while doing so, runs into another young woman calling herself Lisa whom,
unknown to Matthew, is an actress named Alex (Rose Byrne), and may hold the key
to Lisa’s disappearance, and discovery” — I had expected a knock-off of Alfred
Hitchcock’s Vertigo, but that wasn’t
the only Hitchcock movie the writers and director Paul McGuigan were ripping
off.
Also, unlike Hitchcock and his
writer, Samuel Taylor, McGuigan and Boyce made their movie non-linear — it’s
often hard to tell when a particular
scene is taking place and our only even semi-reliable clue is that Josh Hartnett is generally better
dressed in the current scenes than he is in the flashbacks. When he first met
Lisa two years before he was an aspiring photographer who worked in a video
repair store — they met, in fact, when she brought in a camcorder and asked him
to fix it because it wasn’t recording sound — and he wore T-shirts and casual
pants. By the time they re-meet he’s moved to New York, hooked up with an
advertising agency and become engaged to his boss’s daughter, Rebecca (Jessica
Paté), and so the “modern” Matthew wears a suit and tie. He’s just been
relocated back to Chicago and as the film begins he’s scheduled to fly out to
Shanghai to nail down a big account with a Chinese company — only he never
leaves because while having dinner at Bellucci’s Restaurant (apparently an
in-joke reference to Monica Bellucci, the female star of the original French
film, though so many scenes take place at that restaurant one wonders whether
there aren’t any other eating places in
Chicago besides that one and a Wicker Park diner, and why the characters don’t
go somewhere else given all the dire things that happen to them at Bellucci’s)
he sees Lisa, or thinks he does, after hearing her voice tell someone off in
the corridor leading to the restrooms and also a room that’s marked
“Telephone.” (This film takes place in a sort of technological in-between when
cell phones existed but enough people didn’t have them that an infrastructure
of public pay phones still survived.) He traces her to her apartment and they
hook up — only the woman he hooks up with isn’t the original Lisa, though she says her name is Lisa, and it turns out only many reels of
confusion later that she’s really the actress Alex, who’s in Lisa’s apartment
because she’s Lisa’s roommate. The film is full of highly symbolic and
“charged” objects, including a silver compact Lisa supposedly inherited from
her grandmother (and the klutzy Luke drops it and breaks its mirror) and the
key to the apartment, which Matthew accidentally drops down a storm drain and
then has to retrieve in a scene all too obviously copied from Hitchcock’s Strangers
on a Train.
Wicker Park is the sort of movie you want to like but it won’t let you because, despite some quite
impressive scenes, it’s just too confusing. We’re constantly being kept
off-balance as to when we are — if the
Charlie Kaufman-Michel Gondry Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Pedro Almódovar’s Talk to Her are models of how a non-linear film should be done, this is a model for how one shouldn’t — and it
also doesn’t help that Josh Hartnett, whom I quite liked during his brief vogue,
seems miscast. He comes across like the sort of actor who in the 1930’s and
1940’s got built up to replace a potentially recalcitrant star — and the star
they seemed to be aiming him to replace was Tom Cruise, not exactly the
greatest actor or most romantic figure either (and with Cruise in the lead Wicker
Park would be even weaker than it is). It
also doesn’t help that the payoff for all the strange incidents of the plot
seems rather silly — it seems that Alex, even though she was dating Matthew’s friend
Luke, formed an instant, obsessive crush on Matthew the first time she laid
eyes on him and determined to break him and Lisa up so she could get him on the
rebound. And the final meet-up between Matthew and the real Lisa at O’Hare
Airport just when he’s hanging out there and still pretending to have taken
that flight to China (ya remember the flight to China?), and he’s run into Rebecca and broken off their
engagement, just smacked of old-time movie convention. Frankly, this film would
have been more powerful dramatically with them never getting back together and Matthew spending the rest of his
life thinking he recognizes her in
various crowds — something like the beautiful “A Needle in a Haystack” scene in
the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers film The Gay Divorcée, whose writers eventually brought the Astaire and Rogers
characters (back) together in a way far more credible dramatically than
anything Paul McGuigan (yet another director who thinks he’s Alfred Hitchcock, and isn’t) or Brendan Boyce could
manage.
