The Lake House
Well, I’m about to exhaust what little street I may have ever had, but I’m going to just put this out there and we’ll deal with the ramifications. I like The Lake House. There I said it. Now, I realize there’s a good portion of you who quit reading after that, but for those of you who stuck around we’ll work through this together.
After Kate Forster (Sandra Bullock) leaves her beloved lake house she leaves behind a note of well wishes and a request for the next tenant to forward her mail. When that tenant, Alex Wyler (Keanu Reeves), reads this note he assumes there must be some kind of mistake. There wasn’t a tenant before him and it’s 2004 not 2006. The two exchange notes until they come to the conclusion that, unbelievable, they are pen pals through time. Their correspondence turns to friendship then love. Eventually the two decide to meet, but when Alex doesn’t show up Kate becomes distraught at why he would have stood her up. Unfortunately for both of them Alex is trapped in the past and has no idea why he wouldn’t show up two years in the future.
There are some things that really work for this film, especially how Alex’s actions in the past changes Kate’s future. It might be simple, but Alex planting the tree in front of Kate future apartment building and the dog leaving paw prints on the path to the house work for me. I also have to give credit to the scenes that involve Alex seeking out the Kate of his time. He knows that she won’t know who he is and will think he’s a crazy man if he explains why he’s there, but he still wants to be near her. In other films they probably would have just left this out.
You inherently have a problem here with how to make it visually interesting for people to have a relationship via post. What they do is actually fairly clever. Since you obviously can’t have a movie where two people sit by mail boxes and write notes back and forth, they just let you assume that’s what happened. Instead, they shoot it as a conversation, but not as if they were actually speaking to one another. You know how when you are interested in someone you replay your conversations with them over in your head afterwards when you’re alone. That’s what they do here. They take that repeated dialog in quiet moments, such as brushing their teeth and edit it together.
Now don’t think that this isn’t a film that is probably deeply flawed. There are even small things, such as Keanu goes into the attic of a house that blatantly couldn’t possibly have an attic. Not only that, I’m not even sure if it all makes sense. There’s one point where it looks like the filmmakers were a little confused too, because Keanu’s mouth appears to say “2004”, but “2006” has been dubbed over it. Once you start to really examine it, there may be some trouble story wise, but I would bet that any complicated plot based around time will have some glaring holes. Oh, and you’d have to be an idiot not to see the big dramatic twist coming.
Look, there are plenty of problems with this film, I admit that. It’s silly and I’m not entirely sure it makes sense, but if you go into this film with the idea that it sucks it will suck. However give it a chance, it’s pretty sweet and works on a romantic level. You have to just allow for the fact there’s a whole time travel element and that letters can move through time. You can’t go in already thinking it’s not going to be a good film because there’s no such thing as time travel. I hate to break it to you there’s no such things as Hobbits either.
The Grade
- Story: B
- Acting: B-
- Visuals: B
- Originality: B+
- Enjoyability: B
- Overall: B
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