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'Wicker Park' plumps the depths without getting anywhere

By Dave Kehr
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Friday, Oct 22, 2004, Page 16

Wicker Park is a picture full of pretty faces, but without much substance. PHOTOS COURTESY OF FOX MOVIES

Wicker Park finds Josh Hartnett, still looking like the slightly slow-witted captain of a high-school football team, as Matthew, a young Chicagoan poised on the brink of respectability. He has a beautiful, wealthy fiancee (Jessica Pare), a job with her brother's advertising agency and a plane ticket in his pocket for Shanghai, where he is to negotiate the agency's first Asian contract.

But all these fine things fade away when Matthew overhears a conversation on a restaurant pay phone. Although he can't see the face of the woman who is speaking, she sounds just like Matthew's long-lost love, Lisa (Diane Kruger, the Helen of Wolfgang Petersen's recent Troy), a dancer who disappeared from his life two years earlier without leaving a trace.

Not stopping to think, Matthew tosses away his fiancee, career and a first-class recliner seat to China, resolving instead to remain in the city secretly and search for his mystery woman. Helpfully, she's left a hotel key card behind in the phone booth, which Matthew snatches and uses to break into her room, where he luxuriates in the scent of her perfume and steals her favorite compact.

For a moment, you might think that Matthew is behaving like the creepiest stalker imaginable. But stalking turns out to be both the principal theme and principal activity of Wicker Park, which was adapted by Brandon Boyce from L'Appartement, a successful French thriller written and directed by Gilles Mimouni in 1996.

As the other main characters are introduced -- including Matthew Lillard as Luke, the protagonist's goofy shoe-salesman best friend; Rose Byrne as Luke's moody actress girlfriend; and eventually, the elusive Lisa herself -- it develops that practically everyone in the Windy City (played by a miscast Montreal) is following someone else, for reasons it wouldn't be fair to divulge here.

The French original was a clever Hitchcock homage with a murder at its center. For reasons unknown, the murder plot has been dropped from the remake (though a few confusing traces of it remain), which leaves Wicker Park without much real urgency to drive its extremely contrived plot. Behavior that might be understandable and acceptable when there's a life at stake starts to look silly and irresponsible when it's motivated only by the characters' crushes on each other. And the glum, mumbling Hartnett is no James Stewart, able to draw the viewer into the depths of his erotic obsession as Stewart did so memorably in Rear Window and Vertigo.

McGuigan, who last March had the medieval murder mystery The Reckoning in theaters, has clear talents as a filmmaker. He employs an interesting split-screen effect, using digitally blurred borders instead of the standard hard matting to compare multiple points of view, and there are a couple of eerily elongated shots of empty corridors that Hitchcock might have appreciated. But directorial touches can't do much to salvage a project as poorly conceived as this one.

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