Long Walk off a Short Pier
Call me a sucker for temporal displacement. I enjoy watching films that rise to the challenge of explaining time travel, a subject so vastly removed from real science that it's left to the hands of H.G. Wells or Robert Zemeckis to explain to us. There's just too many fascinating problems that have to be dealt with, whether it be a simple mental paradox or the entire disruption of the space-time continuum. There are plenty of movies that try to take on the logical mess known as time travel, with some significant successes. The interesting thing about these successes is that they span all genres, from action (The Terminator series) to comedy (the Back to the Future series) to serious drama (Frequency). Each takes a different view on the challenges, science, and consequences of jumping to another time to prevent or ensure a certain event. The latest attempt at this comes in The Lake House, a story of two people who fall in love despite the greatest of chasms between them - time.

The house in the title is alternately owned by Kate Forrester (Sandra Bullock), a lonely single doctor, and Alex Wyler (Keanu Reeves), a boring single architect. She moves out of the house and leaves a note for the next tenant with good wishes and instructions to forward her mail to a new address. He retrieves the message and is confused, as nobody has lived in the house in years. Instead of sending that reply to the address as instructed (he does eventually go there, but the fact that he didn't right away is just the first bit of twisted logic you'll have to jump over) he drops a reply in the lake house mailbox, which she retrieves. They soon begin to exchange letters through the mailbox, and though they fall in love, they realize they can't meet right away. Why? Because she lives in 2006, he two years earlier.

The concept is interesting, and perhaps in the hands of better actors (particularly in the male lead), it could have been a much better movie. I remember seeing the trailers and saying "why isn't John Cusack in this movie?" If there's one actor who could pull off a plot as ridiculous as sending letters through time in a magical mailbox, it's Cusack. Reeves just can't act unless he's utterly bewildered the entire movie, which is why he was good in The Matrix and looks decent in the upcoming A Scanner Darkly. His Alex plays one note the entire movie, no matter how much back story he's given. Bullock is cute, but she has no chemistry with Reeves, and the fact that they see each other precisely four times in the movie doesn't help much.

Yes, there are cute moments to spare in the movie, and the end of it actually had me squirming in my seat hoping for the best for our protagonists. I actually enjoyed myself watching the whole movie unfold. But the paradoxes that arise in the movie, including a resolution that logically erases the way that Kate and Alex meet, are just gigantic holes in a plot that is already too trite to believe.

Rating: * * 1/2 of 5