Movies

01:00 AM EDT on Friday, September 3, 2004

BY MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal Arts Writer

One too many flashbacks confuse the plot of Wicker Park.

No, make that at least EIGHT too many confusing flashbacks!

Fortunately, just about the time you may be ready to pull the plug on this exercise in frustration, there are glimmers of hope that your patience will be rewarded. Director Paul McGuigan (The Reckoning) revisits some of those flashbacks again and again to (finally) fill in the missing elements of his psychological romantic drama. Oh yes, you might say when some new element has been added. So that's what really went on.

This is all to the good, although Wicker Park holds out too long and depends too much on coincidence in its tale of lies, deceptions and doublecrosses. By the time it wraps up, so many oddball things have happened that it plays more as farce than psychological drama. It takes a long time to discover that one character is actually not who or what this person seems at first and, rather than being innocent, is manipulating the entire plot. Follow that?

More said here would spoil the plot for those who are determined to wallow in that rarest of elements -- the romantic Hollywood drama. Why, there's even a smashingly good kiss as a payoff in Wicker Park, the kind of lip-lock moment seldom seen anymore in American movies, which seem to be more interested in special effects and explosions.

Perhaps its romantic underpinnings are because Wicker Park is based on a French film, L'Appartement. It's also highly possible that the script didn't seem so contrived in French with English subtitles.

Josh Hartnett plays an up-and-coming Chicago photographer who bunks a plum assignment in Shanghai and lies to his fiancee so he can stay in the snow-covered Windy City after he believes he has spotted a long-lost girlfriend leaving a restaurant. Though their affair ended in a standoff, she is THE ONE, and Hartnett's Matthew hasn't forgotten. He finds a hotel room key card she may have left behind and even goes there, sniffing the air to capture her scent. (There's a lot of sniffing of objects in Wicker Park and it becomes downright creepy. Maybe it's a French thing.)

Matthew is just-this-side-of-creepy himself as all sense of reason is trumped by his obsessive drive to find the lovely blonde, Lisa. She's played by Diane Kruger (Helen in Troy), a German actress with an on-again-off-again American accent that sounds a bit French-Canadian, which may be fitting since this very Chicago movie was actually shot in Montreal.

In flashback we see him smitten via her appearance on a video monitor and then their coincidental meeting on a Chicago street, which leads to a live-in affair. If only the real world were this simple. At least that's what eventually is uncovered as all those obscure flashbacks begin to come into better focus as the film unfolds. But sometimes in the early scenes it's difficult to figure out whether what we're watching is taking place in the present or in the past.

Coincidences -- and there's one really major one in Wicker Park -- are heavy-handed ways to advance the fragile plot, which, at times, threatens to go psycho. One of the four main characters, in fact, is referred to as "Psycho" and Matt himself is not far from that designation, too. At one point he goes skulking around an apartment he believes is Lisa's and we think -- "Stalker!"

It would have helped had there been more chemistry between Kruger and the perpetually foggy Hartnett. He doesn't share much magic either with Rose Byrne (who was Brad Pitt's love interest in Troy), another player who holds a key to the plot's many deceptions. Much stronger is Matthew Lillard as Matthew's hapless best friend. He's a comic foil with whom the audience can identify best because, like us, he doesn't know what's going on for most of the picture.

**1/2

Wicker Park

Starring: Josh Hartnett, Rose Byrne, Matthew Lillard, Diane Kruger.

Rated: PG-13, contains sexual situations, adult themes, brief profanity.