FilmBlather.com

"I know she loved me."

Watching Wicker Park before seeing a single review or hearing a single reaction immediately made me want to go on the defensive. I recognized the very things that will make the critics pounce, and I knew I didn't care -- I liked the film in spite and sometimes even because of them. It's contrived, absolutely, and fairly absurd in the nitty gritty, but it couldn't matter less -- this is a movie about mood, and feeling; a story where "destiny" and "love at first sight" aren't mere postulations, they're axioms. Directed with supreme elegance by Paul McGuigan (The Reckoning), the film also has considerable thematic resonance, making excellent use of Josh Hartnett's looks and presence, tossing out some surprising insights into jealousy and obsession.

Hartnett has achieved an impressive degree of fame but little respect in the industry; here, finally, he gets a role that seems to have been tailored for him. His Matthew is good-looking, bright and enormously popular; his career gives him all the breaks, women fall for him left and right, everything he wants he seems to get. He's the definition of a young hotshot, but he doesn't know it, and when he spots a woman whose smile sweeps him off his feet, he sheepishly, silently follows her around, tripping over his own feet and, when he finally speaks to her, his words.

I was fascinated with the screenplay's approach to the protagonist. He's established (rather subtly, at that) to be a profoundly good person who just about has it all -- or, failing that, has the ability to have it all if he plays his cards right. Yet never, not once in the whole film, does he for a second have the slightest perspective on this; ridiculously goal-oriented, he threatens to wreck the life he has built for himself -- his career and engagement hang by a thread -- ripped by a lingering obsession over a past heartbreak and a bit of a Nancy Drew complex. This discrepancy between Matthew's reality and his view of himself remains until the very end; we see what finally happens as his life resuming its rightful course, while to him it is a windfall, a euphoria, or at least a continuation thereof.

The character of Alex becomes very intriguing in this context. She's one of the many women who fell for Matthew -- along with Lisa, and Rebecca, and the airline ticket counter girl -- but unlike the others, she sees herself as having been spurned at every turn. Meanwhile, Matthew isn't even aware of her existence, and his love affair with her friend Lisa absolutely rips her apart. She's jealous, and her jealousy leads her to become a nasty interloper, breaking Matthew and Lisa apart, using the former's friend against him, causing the people around her tremendous hurt. How interesting that it is Matthew's good qualities, and not the opposite, that get him into trouble; that if he weren't so fascinating and smart and desirable and oblivious to it all, he wouldn't be in this mess in the first place. Matthew's final encounter with his fiance cements this theme.

Against all this we have the movie, which is a beautiful piece of work from McGuigan and his crew. It's dreamlike, with a hypnotic score by Cliff Martinez, soft split-screen that perfectly complements the plot's lovely flashback structure, and a unique visual atmosphere that blends warm colors with a wintertime urban setting. McGuigan has a superb sense of wild romanticism, sometimes blending it with thriller-style tension and other times just reveling in it -- love that long final shot, with passersby in the foreground and the background actually noticing our principals and raising their eyebrows.

The contrivances and coincidences, then, seem appropriate in this genre and in this context, further establishing the story as having one foot in the world we know and one foot somewhere else. The conceit, dealing with the multifaceted nature of obsession and desire, is a contrivance in itself, and the plot simply follows suit. It's a wonderful, complicated film, and a terrific rebound for the Scottish director, whose previous go was none too impressive. And something could come of Josh Hartnett yet.