I’m rather hard-hearted. Everyone who knows me knows that. While everyone else was sobbing at Titanic, I’m the one who was looking at my watch sobbing because it wasn’t over yet. I don’t watch chick flicks because I get too antsy waiting for the guy with the sword to come in and get the action going. That’s why I came home from The Lake House thinking that I was going to lose whatever small amount of street cred I had built up.
The fact is, I really liked The Lake House, directed by Alejandro Agresti and starring Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock. The obstacle keeping these two apart is two years, but what’s a pesky little time discrepancy between lovers? And that right there—not whether or not it’s a chick flick—will be the deciding factor on whether or not people like the movie.
Time travel, parallel universes, and alternate dimensions have a long, hit-or-miss history in Hollywood. For some people, the inevitable paradox ruins the entire story. For others, it doesn’t matter if things don’t wrap up neatly and tightly at the end as long as the package is intriguing enough in other areas. I’m in the latter category. I don’t mind the mystery. As long as I can suspend my disbelief for the required 100 minutes, I’m good. And The Lake House is surprisingly good at making one suspend disbelief. Who cares that on the drive home you’re asking, “Wait a minute. What about . . . ?” That’s the fun of time travel paradoxes.
In The Lake House, Dr. Kate Forster has just sold the titular house and has left a letter in the mailbox to the new tenant, Alex Wyler, detailing where mail should be sent in case the post office slips up. When Alex reads the letter and replies, they eventually find out that Alex is exactly two years behind Kate. Through letters — and the mysterious mailbox with its now-up-now-down flag signaling that “you’ve got mail” — Kate and Alex fall in love and must find a way to be together.
It’s hard to say whether the movie would have worked as well without Reeves and Bullock. They’re both so likeable, and the audience wants them so much to be together, that we’re just swept up in the chemistry. The chemistry between them holds the movie together in a couple of slow scenes and keeps this from being just another romance. The ending is pure romance movie rather than time paradox movie — and that’s as it should be; the filmmakers knew their audience.
The story itself doesn’t stand up under close scrutiny. It’s like cotton candy — it’s great to eat it and turn your tongue all blue, but it melts quickly and is a bit sticky in the process. Chances are, this cotton candy of a movie will fade in my memory as Superman Returns and Reeves’ A Scanner Darkly eclipse it. But for the 100 minutes that you’re there, it’s pretty good stuff, blue tongue and all.
It’s hard to understand how you could miss the major point of the movie. If you have ever been involved in Internet II simulatenous productions at multiple locations, you would understand this is a classic problem of latency, cleverly treated. It was not the traditional hackneyed time traveler scenario, and certainly not a chick flick.
Comment by webperformer — July 1, 2006 @ 10:22 am |
I do agree that it was cleverly treated — much more so than I expected. And you may be right about it being a latency problem; that doesn’t necessarily obviate the paradoxes that many people have with any kind of time travel/parallel universes/different dimensions, and I think this would include latency — or at least latency of two years.
And I agree about this not being a chick flick. It was certainly marketed that way, however. The time element is what kept it interesting. And, unlike most chick flicks, the male character was not only integral to the story but had his own story as well.
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