The Lake House

Sandra Hall, reviewer
July 22, 2006

A sci-fi twist on convention leaves logic and love in a time warp.

A very matter-of-fact Sandra Bullock in 
The Lake House.

A very matter-of-fact Sandra Bullock in The Lake House.

Run Time
98 minutes
United States
Alejandro Agresti
Sandra Bullock, Keanu Reeves, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Christopher Plummer.

Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves are back together for the first time since they emerged shaken and stirred from their ride aboard the bus in Speed 12 years ago.

On second thoughts, "together" doesn't quite explain the state in which they find themselves in The Lake House, which is a Sleepless in Seattle-type love story - an example of the delayed gratification model, where circumstances conspire to ensure that the lovers spend much of the picture apart. In Sleepless, they lived on opposite sides of the country. In The Lake House, Reeves's Alex and Bullock's Kate are even more seriously inconvenienced. They happen to occupy different periods in time.

The film is a remake of Il Mare, a South Korean film festival favourite that caught the attention of Doug Davison, a producer who has proved himself adept at retooling Asian haunted-house movies for Western audiences with hits such as The Ring and The Grudge.

But this one is different. The spirits who hang around The Lake House have nothing but love in their hearts. We're in the land of magic realism, which may be why Davison and his fellow producers hired an Argentine director - Alejandro Agresti ( Valentin) - who is working with a script by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Auburn ( Proof).

It probably needs nothing less than a Pulitzer Prize winner to grapple with the complications of this premise, which gets under way with a soulful-looking Kate, who is leaving the much-loved home she has been renting - a glass-walled stilt house on the shores of a mid-western lake - to move to Chicago. She's a doctor with a new job at one of the city's biggest hospitals and, before bidding the house a sad goodbye, she writes a note to its new tenant with a forwarding address for her mail.

This is the cue for Alex's arrival. As the incoming tenant, he finds the note and writes back. A flourishing correspondence follows and all seems promising until they learn that she's leading her life in 2006, while he's exactly two years behind her, so he is not the house's new tenant but its old one.

This is tricky - for Kate, Alex and the filmmakers, who have to think up ways of keeping a remote control romance hot while coolly ensuring that the rules of engagement are clear to us all. The lake house's letter box, for instance, can exist simultaneously in both time zones, as can Jack, the dog shared by Kate and Alex. And the script shows absolutely no restraint when it comes to the old sci-fi convention allowing a character to eradicate potential disaster by knowingly tweaking past events. All this entails a lot of juggling with split screens, which Agresti accomplishes quite adroitly.

Occasionally, too, the lovers are permitted to come face to face - hence a kiss is engineered partway through the action when they happen to be guests at the same party. Since it takes place in Alex's time zone, he recognises Kate as his future love but she hasn't a clue who he is because, in her time frame, they haven't yet started writing to one another.

If you can go along with that, you may also be able to sit still for the excruciatingly laborious conversation that leads up this impetuous moment of romantic contact as Alex dwells on his dilemma.

I was just confused - addled by the effort of trying to keep track of who was supposed to know what when. Nor could I understand how the lovers could accept the supernatural's intervention into their lives without wondering a little more about the causes and mechanics of it all.

Bullock is particularly matter-of-fact. Her way with a deadpan double-take may be one of her great assets as a comic, but it doesn't exactly enhance the poignancy of the piece when she's supposedly yearning for a love she may never meet. Reeves is more closely attuned to the mood. He also has a pertinent sub-plot to keep him busy. An architect from a distinguished family of architects, Alex is at odds with his father (Christopher Plummer), a flinty patrician who believes that he and his son should be working together. All this talk about design gives Agresti a multitude of excuses for getting caught up with the glories of Chicago's architecture. He has his cameras perform a kind of ballet with the city's most venerable buildings, stitching together a graceful montage of brick and glass in time to the smooth melange of jazz and pop standards that make up the film's score. Of all the film's metaphors and motifs - and it has more than enough - this is its most effective, a gorgeous visual acknowledgment of the past's gifts to the future.

It also does a lot to paper over the yawning gaps in logic that start opening up as the story gets closer to its seductively sentimental, but utterly implausible, big finish.
