Movie Vault

Reviewed by: Kat Babcock

The old-fashioned, star-crossed, movie-star romance is pretty much a dead
genre in today’s Hollywood. If a movie has a romantic element at all, it’s
invariably a subplot buried under a mountain of history, action or raucous
comedy. But The Lake House, makes us take a step back in time, to when Clark
Gable was wooing Betty Davis, when romance was something you couldn’t just
buy with a Halmark card or a dozen roses.

That said, I’m thinking the mostly female audience, for whom this movie is
intended, will enjoy “The Lake House,” a tender romance about two
star-crossed — or rather, time-crossed — lovers who just can’t quite get
together. It’s also about how and why people end up being isolated.

Sandra Bullock is Kate, a doctor in a busy Chicago hospital. Despite the
fact that she’s surrounded by people all day, she doesn’t have many in her
personal life, which revolves around her widowed mother and her dog.

Kate has moved to an apartment after living in a glass-walled house on Lake
Michigan. She leaves the new tenant a letter asking him to forward her mail.

The “new” tenant is architect Alex (Keanu Reeves), who writes “2004″ on his
letters. She thinks he has made a mistake, and he, too, thinks that she is
in error when she writes “2006.” But it turns out that somehow, through the
magic of a mailbox, these two people living in different years can
correspond.

As screenwriter David Auburn demonstrated in his Pulitzer Prize- and Tony
Award-winning play Proof, he knows how to show connections between people
who aren’t in the same place at the same time. At first, reflecting the
stiffness of a first encounter, Kate and Alex simply read letters. As they
begin bonding, they speak as they write from different locations. As they
grow closer, we see them at two tables in the empty cafeteria of the
hospital where Kate works. They don’t see each other, but words spill out
between them through the walls of time without the benefit of touch, sight
or sound.

Waiting patiently for love is very difficult in this day and age when we
squirm when we have to wait a few seconds for an elevator, get frustrated
when we are put on hold on the telephone, and look for instant messages on
our computers. The Lake House operates at a different pace. The characters
linger over their letters and gaze thoughtfully into the distance as they
try to absorb their situation. In one scene Kate sits quietly in a
restaurant for hours. The key to their love is the ability to keep their
hope alive while they wait. And so it often is for the rest of us.

Bullock and Reeves prove to us that chemistry can happen with the most
unlikely of pairs, that two people, two years apart can overcome obstacles
as big as reality, to endure a love through the ages. This is not a film
that is supposed to convince people that magic can happen with love, the
message behind it is merely to encourage people not to give up on the hope
of finding that one person who may have been out there waiting for us.