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THE LAKE HOUSE

Reviewed by Heather Picker

The syrupy ads for The Lake House made it look like The Notebook '06: Real Estate Edition. Don't be fooled. That is not what The Lake House is about. The Lake House is about a magical mailbox. The studio puts money in it and raises the flag, and then the screenwriter takes the money out and replaces it with 90 pages of mediocrity and puts the flag down. They do this several times until a test audience approves.

What, you're not buying it? Fine. This much is indisputable: The Lake House is a remake of Il Mare, a South Korean film that is only six years old. Why remake a film that has yet to graduate kindergarten? Because it is subtitled and studios aren't sure moviegoers know how to read.

Even remade specifically for an American audience, The Lake House is hard to follow. The story is simple, but the details are so convoluted that it's questionable whether the filmmakers even understood what they were doing. (That might have worked for Howard Hawks and company, but we're not in The Big Sleep territory here.) One thing that's abundantly clear is they don't expect viewers to ask questions, and indeed the movie works better when you approach it without the slightest expectation that it will make a modicum of sense.

Sandra Bullock plays Kate Forrester, a doctor living in the year 2006. Keanu Reeves plays Alex Wyler, an architect living in the year 2004. They're trapped on a speeding bus and – oh, wait. Scratch that. They have a lake house in common and through the mysterious workings of its mailbox (played by Dennis Hop—oh, never mind) they are able to communicate with each in yawn-inducing letters that make the e-mail exchanges in You've Got Mail sound – well, not good, you know, because You've Got Mail sucked, but not completely horrible, either.

They fall in love, mostly since they're in a movie and that's what happens in movies when there's not enough money in the budget for big shootouts and explosions. Along the way, The Lake House poses several interesting questions. There's the usual stuff about the distance between lovers, the slightly less usual stuff about a chess-playing dog that can be two places at once, and my personal favorite, while not implicit in the screenplay, is nonetheless hard to ignore. Best asked in an exaggerated Jerry Seinfeld voice, it goes roughly like this: What is it with doctors and architects and real estate and metaphysics? Last year Reese Witherspoon was a doctor in a coma in Just Like Heaven, with Mark Ruffalo as the beleaguered landscape architect who can't shake her spirit after moving into her apartment. Are we witnessing the birth of a new movie craze?

That brings us to another question, if I might digress. Did the makers of The Lake House really think draping a stethoscope around Sandra Bullock's shoulders and putting Keanu Reeves in a hardhat and an old pickup truck would lend the slightest bit of authenticity to their characters? Chirpy Witherspoon, who brings a bit of residual Tracy Flick know-it-all-ness to every role she takes, looked more convincing in scrubs than Bullock does tending to pint-sized patients; it's hard to imagine moony Kate thinking about anyone but herself – or Alex – long enough to make a diagnosis. That brings us to the Reeves versus Ruffalo match-up. The actors share a perpetually stoned quality that initially makes us suspicious of their ability to do anything but watch television and rummage through the fridge and do the slow-react "whoa" to things that are rarely whoa-worthy. (It should go without saying both actors are, in fact, capable of lots more than that.) The edge, I suppose, must go to Reeves, whose character at least knows how to use a drafting table, though in Ruffalo's defense he wasn't called on to do much than rearrange plants in Heaven.

But back to The Lake House. Kate and Alex might be separated by two years, but two years is a more manageable distance than the ones we're used to from time travel romances like Somewhere in Time or Kate & Leopold, and the resourceful would-be lovers try to find ways to make their lives intersect. They are also given a couple of perfunctory romantic interests to create a bit of suspense, but Alex is clearly cold to the high-maintenance assistant (Lynn Collins) who ogles his jeans at construction sites, and we know Kate's buttoned-down lawyer ex Morgan (Dylan Walsh) is toast when he asks her to turn down the volume on Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious.

The languid pacing of the screenplay (credited to Proof playwright David Auburn) is grating at first, and there's no real attempt at character development, but under the guidance of director Alejandro Agresti, The Lake House settles into a familiar groove that straddles the thin line between quaintly likable and vacuous. Or is it just that the film is so tonally confused and visually muted (if we didn't know it before, we catch on to the fact that Kate and Alex belong together when they both wear red on Valentine's Day; colors don't exist in the worlds of the rest of the characters) that it eventually has a narcotizing effect?

At its heart the film is an old-fashioned romance; Bullock even gets a Deborah Kerr moment, waiting for the uninspired climax to deliver a line that would be at home in any 1950s weeper: "It was you at the Daley Plaza that day!" It also wants to be a bunch of other things, like quirky and hip, but the unconventional casting choices – Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Alex's younger brother, a fellow architect who can't believe Alex has lowered himself to designing condo developments, and Shohreh Aghdashloo as the wry and kindhearted Dr. Klyczynski, Kate's mentor – while welcome, only emphasize Kate and Alex's fundamental dullness. There's also a stab at family drama in the form of Alex's chilly relationship with his mercurial father, a legendary architect who has never found his sons as interesting as he finds himself, but the subplot isn't given much serious consideration. And really, when isn't Christopher Plummer narrowing his eyes and making disapproving comments?

There's a moment early in Kate and Alex's epistolary affair when Bullock, sounding like she's just been nudged awake by a production assistant, all but yawns as Kate announces her desire to give her heart – her whole heart, she clarifies, for those who thought she was only speaking of the upper or lower half – to Alex. We're sure she will. Anyone else, she'd bore to death.

The Lake House is available on DVD, HD-DVD and Blu-ray. Directed by Alejandro Agresti. Screenplay by David Auburn, from a story by Eun-Jeong Kim and Ji-na Yeo. Starring Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock, with Shohreh Aghdashloo, Christopher Plummer, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach. 2006, 105 min., Rated PG for some language and a disturbing image.

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