BEFORE: Christopher Cousins carries over from "Draft Day". And Josh Hartnett is back in the countdown, after three action films earlier this month. Sometimes it just makes sense to split one film off from a mini-chain of films with the same actor, because I need to spread things out - look, if I'd come here right after "Fight or Flight" or "Wrath of Man" I would have missed out on a bunch of films, and I'd be too close to Easter way too soon. Easter is coming up this weekend, I better load up on some Reese's eggs or something.
THE PLOT: A young advertising executive searches obsessively for his ex-lover Lisa who disappeared two years earlier.
AFTER: Well, this film is a complete mess, I don't know how else to describe it. It looked like it was going to fit in with last week's theme about people being kidnapped or otherwise disappearing, only this one doesn't really go with that because here the missing woman just sort of moved unexpectedly. She got a job offer in London and just left, which is a thing that somebody might do, and it's not her fault if she just forgot to inform the man who was running around town trying to randomly bump into her.
Let me back up a bit, because the movie does that frequently, it's way too flashback-y and it presents us with something of a split timeline, some events are in the present and others are in the past, and the film skips between the two without much warning. I had to re-watch the first half hour just so I could determine which scenes were the flashbacks, and I'm on a tight timeline, I can't be watching a movie one and a half times just because it's hard to understand. But we meet Matthew when he's moved back to Chicago, he's dating his co-worker and things seem to be going OK, and his boss has gifted him a new account, but the next meeting is in China because these people have never heard of Zoom meetings. Maybe in 2004 that wasn't a thing, but still, to fly to China for one meeting, when the clients are right THERE in Chicago seems pretty stupid. But, you know, business.
Matthew seems like he has it all, great job, beautiful girlfriend, he even bumps into his old friend Luke on the street, and they look forward to getting into some trouble together. Yep, everything's coming together, so it's time for Matthew to shoot himself in the foot and tear it all down. The problem comes after the meeting in the restaurant when he overhears a phone call in the back and he goes into the apartment-sized phone booth (it must be a fancy restaurant, if the phone call room is bigger than the restroom, but you know, it was a different time, before everyone had cell phones) and he swears he can smell his ex-girlfriend's perfume. He rushes out only to see her from the back as she breaks a heel and almost falls down. But he can't catch up with her, it's maddeningly going to take the rest of the movie for that to happen.
He then misses his plane to China on purpose (the first of many times) so that he can search Chicago for Lisa, who he has determined is back in town, only, how to find her? It's not like there's a thing called directory assistance or the internet, so instead he has to follow clues like a detective would, back at the restaurant she somehow left a folder with her hotel key, so OK, that might be a good place to start. He goes to her room at the Drake and searches her room, he even falls asleep there, which triggers another round of flashbacks or dreams. So this is a good chance for us to learn how he first met Lisa, which has something to do with a camcorder that won't record audio, him seeing her on video and then in person across the street while he's watching that video, then following her to a dance studio so he can watch her rehearse. This leads to her coming into Luke's shoe store so Matthew can pretend to work there and tell her that those red heels she wants aren't available in her size, but they can be ordered. But she knows he's been following her, and somehow that's not creepy at all to her, so they agree to meet the next day and kind of fall into a relationship.
But you know, life happens and one day she disappeared, later we learn that Matthew had asked her to move in with him (after knowing her for what, three days?) and that's too fast, man. Who can blame her for running away from the guy who basically stalked her and then jumped the gun on living together? You know, sometimes we make choices and we have to live with them, but I guess maybe that erratic woman you slept with two years ago is always going to evoke that powerful fantasy even though you've got a beautiful girlfriend right next to you who will even drive you to the airport, and isn't that what love is all about? No, by all means, ditch the flight and go roam around Chicago's underworld trying to get lucky.
When Matthew finally finds Lisa, she looks completely different - probably because she's not Lisa, she's a different Lisa who was also at the restaurant and seems a little sketchy, but what the hell, Matthew will sleep with her anyway. Wait, WHAT? Is she pretending to be Lisa, or was Lisa pretending to be her, what exactly is going on here? We see a lot of the same events again from a different P.O.V., but still nothing is starting to make sense. Meanwhile things seem to be going great for Luke, who's been dating this actress named Alex, she even forgives him when he doesn't show up for their date because Matthew borrowed Luke's car and didn't bring it back on time. Matthew also books another flight to China but fails to go to the airport again.
The third time we jump back in time and go through this crazy exercise again, we learn that Alex and second Lisa look a lot alike, Luke and Matthew go to her play performance (she's terrible, at acting, BTW, and I'm not sure if this actress that I think is a good actress was a bad actress back then, or if she was acting like a bad actress would - I suppose it doesn't matter) and she's wearing a lot of make-up, so the two guys don't put it together that they've slept with the same woman. Matthew has to leave the play to NOT take the next flight to China, and you would think there would be some repercussions at his job that he's missed the meeting completely, but the explanation is somehow that an Italian businessman's wife died in a car crash. No, I don't understand that either.
The "explanation" for all this is that Lisa and Alex were friends, except the "guy from the newspaper" (who I think was the Italian businessman) was stalking Alex, so she switched apartments with Lisa for a while. And Alex fell in love with Matthew, but he only had eyes for Lisa, the mystery woman he saw across the street. Or maybe Alex was in love with Lisa, that's all a bit unclear. Anyway, Alex was masquerading as Lisa so she could get Matthew's attention or something like that, but that seems very unhealthy, too, like why didn't she just keep dating Luke? It feels like everyone here wants what they can't have and nobody wants to be in the job or relationship that they do have. Alex was also deliberately keeping Matthew and Lisa from getting together, by not delivering hand-written notes and deleting voicemail messages.
This feels a bit like bargain-basement David Lynch, like I'm thinking about "Lost Highway" where one character became a completely different person somehow and "Mulholland Drive" where two characters got so close to each other that they switched places, and the audience is just supposed to accept these things as if they could really happen. Like if you're going to go for it, really go for it, but "Wicker Park" has nothing but terrible reasons to explain why one person would impersonate another, and then there are also no repercussions for that. I've tried my best to make heads or tails out of "Wicker Park", but I think I've failed - or perhaps there's nothing there that does make any sense, in which case I'm exonerated.
I think there are also maybe some translation errors, since this is based on a French film titled "L'Appartement", which in turn is loosely based on Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and all of that play's star-crossed lovers. I think maybe Billy Shakes invented "reductio ad absurdum" with regards to love stories, when you have fairies pouring love potions (ruffies) into people's eyes and giving people donkey heads, you're really exploring all the things that could POSSIBLY go wrong in relationships. But here in "Wicker Park" they changed the play-within-a-play to "Twelfth Night", which makes a bit of sense, because that play also has someone falling in love with someone in disguise. Still I stand by my initial ruling, that this is all one giant mess.
Directed by Paul McGuigan (director of "Lucky Number Slevin" and "The Reckoning")
Also starring Josh Hartnett (last seen in "Wrath of Man"), Rose Byrne (last seen in "Ezra"), Matthew Lillard (last seen in "Five Nights at Freddy's"), Diane Kruger (last seen in "Marlowe"), Jessica Paré (last seen in "Another Kind of Wedding"), Vlasta Vrana (last seen in "French Exit"), Amy Sobol, Ted Whittall (last seen in "The Calling"), Joanna Noyes, Mark Camacho (last seen in "Shattered Glass"), Marcel Jeannin (last seen in "The Greatest Game Ever Played"), Stefanie Buxton, Stanley Hilaire, Zhenhu Han, Lu Ye, Christian Paul (last seen in "Death Race"), Gillian Ferrabee (last seen in "Secret Window"), Miranda Handford, Benjamin Hatcher, Richard Jutras (last seen in "Dream Scenario"), Mary Morter, Erika Rosenbaum (last seen in "The Hummingbird Project"), Jessica Schulte (last heard in "Megamind"), Paul Doucet, Jamieson Boulanger, Carrie Colak, Gordon Masten (last seen in "Stanley & Iris")
RATING: 3 out of 10 sleeping pills (maybe the whole film is just one long fever dream...)
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