Wicker Park (2004)

Wicker Park arrives in 2004 carrying the weary baggage of a French original, L'Appartement, and a development history that chewed through directors and leading men before settling on Paul McGuigan and Josh Hartnett. The premise is a man who abandons a business trip to China in order to stalk the memory of a woman who vanished two years earlier. He is an advertising executive. Chicago looks expensive. Everyone has good cheekbones and a cell phone they decline to use. This is a romantic thriller assembled from coincidence, and the critics of the day were unimpressed, handing it a 27 percent approval rating and a box office return well short of its budget.

For the purposes of cultural classification, the film presents a clean slate. Its cast is uniformly white, its women exist as objects of pursuit and plot machinery, and race never surfaces as a subject. There is no queer subtext, no environmental concern, no critique of the wealth on display, and no interest in bodies beyond conventional glamour. The heroine is a dancer, which is offered as a personality. No character is coded as neurodivergent. The narrative is contemporary and therefore has no history to revise, and the film never pauses to instruct its audience on anything, which may be its single most admirable quality. It simply wants to be a puzzle, and a muddled one at that.

A sommelier of such things would note the absence of any modern social consciousness, and would note it without disappointment. Wicker Park is a product of its moment, a glossy exercise in mistaken identity and withheld notes, guilty chiefly of implausibility. It lectures no one. It represents no one in particular. It asks only that we believe a woman would keep a secret for two years for no reason the screenplay can defend. The vintage is 2004, the body is thin, and the finish is a shrug.