When more than a lake divides

The Lake House (2006)
Warner Bros. Pictures presents an Alejandro Agresti film, starring Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock. Written by David Auburn. 105m. PG for some language and a disturbing image.

2 stars

She’s walked by the Fine Arts Building perhaps a hundred times, but never noticed its hidden beauty until he shows her on a sunny Saturday afternoon - with the help of a carefully drawn map and a mailbox that transcends the space-time continuum.

Kate (Sandra Bullock) and Alex (Keanu Reeves) are falling in love, although their forthcoming union is a metaphysical quandary. That’s not because they’re on different career tracks; it’s because they’re living in entirely different years.

“The Lake House” is a romance that finds itself tangled in a web of science-fiction hokum. Audiences are therefore obligated to make a choice: suspend all formal notions of logic and embrace the characters, or become increasingly irritated by the plot’s growing irrationality.

The couple’s only tangible connection is the lake house, an architectural curiosity constructed over a tranquil lake somewhere north of Chicago. When Alex moves in to the all-glass dwelling, he finds a note from Kate, who claims to be a previous tenant and requests her mail be forwarded.

Curious, Alex thinks, because he’s quite familiar with the former owners of the lake house and believes the structure has been abandoned for quite some time. It’s only a matter of time before the corresponding couple discovers that Alex, an architect, is living in the year 2004 and Kate, a lonely doctor, is writing from the present.

This scenario invites a veritable treasure trove of potential directions. If I could correspond with my 2004 self, it’d be tempting to slip myself the winning numbers on a mega-million dollar Powerball. But “The Lake House” adopts a more myopic track, desirous only to see its characters find love for perhaps the first time.

This attitude flaunts practicality, wherein Kate resists any unspoken temptation to “google” her man and peek at his future. Instead, this film acts as a celebration of the extended courtship, a reinvestment in true romance over an endless array of meet cutes.

Before the relationship blossoms, Kate and Alex share a somber detachment to life. They sleep-walk through their days, feeling estranged from quality human interaction. Alex has recently returned from a self-imposed exile. Buying the lake house is a form of self-flagellation, a glass and steel reminder of his architect father’s (Christopher Plummer) growing dedication to his work instead of his family. And Kate allows her amorous ex-boyfriend (Dylan Walsh) to reinsert himself back into her life, perhaps because she fears being alone more than she does being unhappy.

The direction, by Argentinean Alejandro Agresti, seems to perk up just as the film’s characters do. Dates become opportunities to awaken audiences to the aesthetic pleasures of Daley Plaza (and its intriguing Picasso sculpture) and other Southside architectural landmarks. Playwright David Auburn, whose screenplay for “Proof” did not shy away from sometimes overwhelming discourses on mathematics, follows the same convention here, outfitting Alex with a real architect’s intelligence and lexicon.

To excise the monotony of each character waiting for the other one to deposit a note in the mailbox, Agresti stages many conversations littered with one-sentence responses to keep the story humming along. Sure it doesn’t logically flow, but the filmmakers have probably already assumed you’re either fully committed to the romance or to nit-picking violations of the temporal laws.

Bullock and Reeves, who have reunited onscreen for the first time since “Speed,” have an undeniable chemistry. While that’s certainly important for this film to be successful, so is a willing suspension of disbelief. The film suggests its characters can singularly focus on their relationship. The question remains: Can we?