The Lake House

From its opening montage showing line after line of spidery calligraphy, The Lake House marks itself as the anti-You’ve Got Mail, renouncing that movie’s computer-age reliance on email and attempting to reclaim handwritten letters as the nexus of film romance. If epistolary love affairs – with their cycle of reading, writing and waiting for a reply – are inherently uncinematic, The Lake House offers an intriguing time-lapse solution. Reunited for the first time since Speed (1994), Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves are Kate and Alex, tenants of the eponymous house living two years apart but able to communicate via notes left in the house’s mailbox.

Adapted from the 2000 Korean drama Shiweolae, Alejandro Agresti’s film thus creates both an obstacle to the course of the couple’s love – they fall for each other immediately but have trouble meeting up in their respective time zones – and an effective delivery system for their billets-doux. Notes posted by Alex in 2004 appear instantaneously in the same mailbox in Kate’s 2006, and vice versa, with none of the lovelorn clock-watching that might have deadened the story’s pace. The immediate response time allows the couple to use brief, conversational phrases (‘Who are you?’ ‘Can this be happening?’) reminiscent of web chatroom speak. Though peppered with references to Kerouac, Dostoevsky and Jane Austen, this bookish romance is perhaps less literary than it claims.

Playwright David Auburn’s script works hard to convince us that the two-year barrier is as insurmountable as the characters believe. In a scene of near contact at a railway station, Alex chases after the departing train on which the 2004 Kate, who does not yet know who he is, looks bemusedly out from her accelerating carriage. Agresti aims for Brief Encounter levels of heightened pathos, but the moment is undermined by the viewer’s nagging feeling that the pair are making their rendezvous more difficult than it need be. Bullock’s Kate, in particular, appears resigned to tormented inertia.

Apart from providing the opportunity for one or two novel romantic gestures, as when Alex plants a sapling outside Kate’s future window that grows, as if in a second, into a beautiful tree, the concurrent timeframes merely entangle the narrative in space-time paradoxes, which could be happily overlooked if more fun had been had with time-juggling. Instead, the device seems an arbitrary means of delaying consummation, not unlike Kate’s de facto boyfriend Morgan (Dylan Walsh), a priggish bore who forgets Valentine’s Day and responds to a passionate scene between Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in Notorious by asking Kate to turn the television down.

The film’s third character should really have been the lake house of the title, a glass-walled bungalow standing on stilts on the shoreline of Lake Michigan. Regrettably, the building is imbued with neither the physical presence nor the required aura of magic to justify its centrality to the narrative. How disappointing that in this hymn to the letter, the house itself should prove not worth writing home about.

This review features in the August 2006 issue of Sight & Sound.