Wicker Park

An affair to forget: No one in illogical Wicker Park behaves even remotely like a real person

By Jeannette Catsoulis

Remember those ads for Calvin Klein's "Eternity," in which white-clad men and women followed each other around spouting nonsense as if it were the Ten Commandments? Remember thinking, What on Earth? Well, watching Wicker Park will give you exactly the same feeling; the only difference being the Calvin Klein ads were over in 15 seconds.

A deranged remake of the 1996 French mystery L'Appartement--which featured Vincent Cassel and Monica Bellucci as two members of a very warped foursome--Wicker Park is an object lesson in lame-brained filmmaking. Fuzzy Josh Hartnett (Hollywood Homicide) plays Matthew, an investment banker with an urgent appointment in Shanghai and a fiancée (Jessica Paré) who also happens to be the boss's daughter. After two years in New York trying to forget Lisa, the love of his life (Troy's Diane Kruger), Matthew has come home to Chicago a healed man. Or so he thinks.

No sooner has he set foot in the old neighborhood--Wicker Park--than he begins to glimpse Lisa through store windows and hear her voice through restaurant walls. He keeps trying to board a plane for China, but his elusive lover, always just minutes ahead of him, holds him back. Sniffing her trail, he finds clues--a shredded newspaper, a broken shoe--while his old friend Luke (Matthew Lillard) tries to distract him with his own romantic problems. Then things get even weirder when Matthew catches up with Lisa and finds she no longer looks like Diane Kruger. Now she looks like another actress from Troy: Rose Byrne. Excuse me, can we see that again?

Wicker Park wants to be Laura and Single White Female and An Affair to Remember--and even Cinderella--all rolled into one. Paul McGuigan (The Reckoning) directs like a child who has just discovered his own reflection, lining every scene with mirrors and sticking his camera in his actors' nostrils. Movie screens, he believes, were made to be split; why restrict yourself to one image when you can have two? Or better, three? A cast this pretty was meant to be looked at, no question, but no amount of jazzy flashbacks or forced moodiness or gratingly intrusive soundtrack can disguise the picture's essential inertia. Or its stupidity.

It's a sad day indeed when a movie's most memorable performance belongs to Scooby-Doo's Matthew Lillard, but there it is. Even doing his usual Jeff Goldblum twitch-and-giggle, Lillard has more depth than his three co-stars put together. Hartnett, a graduate of the Bland Affleck Academy, wears the same expression of detached befuddlement from beginning to end; while Kruger, though no longer Helen of Troy, still acts as though attached to the front of a ship. These hot young things display about as much complexity as Jessica Simpson's cranial CT scan.

No one in Wicker Park behaves even remotely like a real person. Matthew sees a blond Lisa running from a restaurant, then believes a brunette stranger when she says it was her. Keys are abandoned and retrieved, husbands are spoken of once, then never mentioned again, plot threads are snipped off and discarded. This is the kind of movie where people fall desperately in love after a single sighting, then stalk each other obsessively. It's the kind of movie where a girl says to a total stranger, "You seem like a nice guy. Why don't you stay?" before offering him morning coffee and her spare key. Come to think of it, that happens to me all the time.