The Lake House

When earnest young doctor Kate moves out of the glass lake house she's been renting, in 2006, she leaves a note for the new tenant. Moving into the same house in 2004, architect Alex discovers the note and, not knowing what else to do, leaves another in the same mailbox by way of reply. So begins a strange correspondence across time, which gradually leads to love. But there's a reason why events have unfolded this way and the two distant lovers must strive to discover it before it's too late.

The Lake House is a beautifully shot and pleasingly enigmatic film, which strives to bring something new to both the time travel and the romance genres. Unfortunately, it just doesn't have enough story to fill 100 minutes. It is in the nature of films with this kind of subject matter to become predictable, but in this case certain twists are so glaringly obvious from the start that it's hard to be patient with the characters' struggle to figure them out, and would-be dreamy moments are spoiled by a longing for them to pull themselves together and get on with it. Though there are one or two dodgy plot holes, the scriptwriter has had the good sense not to lay down any rules about how time travel works, or to fret over paradoxes, so the viewer is left in the same position as the characters, just figuring it out as they go along. This is fairly well handled and the story itself is well crafted, but it still really drags.

What it needs is a charismatic pair of leads who could really make us care about what happens to them. Sandra Bullock is very good, proving once again that she deserves much better roles than she generally gets. In their scenes together, she even manages to elicit some naturalistic acting from Reeves (reminding one of the chemistry between them in Speed), but on his own Reeves is a disaster. He can't even chat to a colleague on a building site without behaving as if he's trying to declaim Greek tragedy. Too often his performance verges on the unintentionally comic and, at other times, it's so soulless that one has to make a conscious effort to overlook it in order to enjoy the film.

For those prepared to put up with its poor pacing, The Lake House would probably make a good date movie, achieving as it does a fair balance between romance and mystery. It does have a tendency to over-intellectualise, trying to make itself look clever with literary and architectural references at the expense of letting us get to know the characters through the acting. The supporting cast is fairly good, though sometimes oddly stilted, suggesting a self-conscious director and too many re-takes. Like many celebrations of passionate love, the story displays a slightly distasteful cruelty to those minor characters unfortunate enough to be in the way, and we're not encouraged to give them any sympathy.

Worth watching for Bullock's performance, but deeply flawed.