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Wicker Park
(2004)
Dir: Paul McGuigan
The plot of Wicker Park is like a snowball rolling down a hill. It starts with a guy meets girl story--well actually it starts with a guy sees girl, follows girl, watches girl then pretends to be a shoe salesman just to talk to girl. This part confused me because as Married With Children has taught us, shoe salesmen are not attractive, so scoring a date by pulling an Al Bundy on this girl just doesn’t seem plausible. I believe the exact plot of this film is that Mathew (Josh Hartnett) sees this girl, Lisa (Diana Kruger), on a home video tape which is playing in the camera store he works at. Obvious case of love at first sight. He tracks the girl down, they enjoy a PG13-erotic relationship before she suddenly disappears. Two years go by and they still haven’t be able to contact each other, so Hartnett decides to move on to his next relationship, which is equally underdeveloped for film goers. During a corporate dinner he believes he sees his first love running out of a phone booth. Infatuated with this girl of his past, he performs the first unreasonable act of the film (several are required to make it a love story). He ditches his plane to Japan for an important business trip and goes on a five day search for Kruger. In those days we are introduced to a good friend of Hartnett’s, Lucas, who comes in handy as a comic relief who gives advice on psycho girls. We also are strung through a giant maze of events and hurdles that the characters must maneuver. It must have been the director’s rule that there will always be one more thing.
The problem with Wicker Park is that it wants to be a mystery/suspense/romance film. I was always waiting for either girl to just pull out a pistol and say “He’s my man and I have six lead, to prove it!” Like all romance movies there are at least a dozen times where logic is suspended for the sake of making an emotional scene and there are several occasion when the two people we want to get back together, are in the same room, which left me yelling at the screen, “just turn around you dumb sonofbitch.” The mere fact that I’m yelling the exact phrase that every body yells at Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween when Michael is creeping up behind her is further proof that this movie wants to be suspenseful. For some reason I did like this movie. Maybe it’s because I can relate to the whole, stalking-someone-who-doesn’t-know-you-exist thing, or maybe it’s because I watched it late at night with my buddies Jack and Daniel, but there was just enough entertainment in the film for me to get pass the countless flaws.
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