Okay, so sometimes I watch schlocky movies on Netflix when my husband is out of town. This one at least starred Keanu Reeves, an actor I could watch read the Yellow Pages and thoroughly enjoy myself. So I've established that I enjoyed myself, but still I found myself yelling at the screen a few times over how stupid the story is.
A time-travel romantic drama/fantasy also starring Sandra Bullock, right away you know we are not talking rocket science. But oddly enough, The Lake House (released in 2004) did turn out to be rather rocket-scientific, if for no other reason than the plot involves time and space and how we relate to them, no easy subject to comprehend. This conundrum is covered much more coherently in a novel called "Time and Again," by Jack Finney, which I highly recommend. (If you have not read it, just stop reading this and go to Amazon right now and order it... I'll give you a few minutes and find a picture to post while you're gone.)
So anyway, The Lake House is after all about a lake house, one that is shared by two different occupants at different times. As one of them moves out, she leaves a note for the next tenant to please forward her mail. Fine, except the next occupant turns out to be the previous tenant. Kate (Bullock) is living in 2006 and Alex (Reeves) is living in 2004, and they can write letters to each other because of the magical mailbox out front which transports their mail almost instantly, despite them living 62 miles apart. (He's in Kenosha, Wisconsin and she's in Chicago.)
They exchange letters daily and fall in love, even though Kate is living "in the future." Ha! What future -- very little changes in two years except maybe the Twin Towers fell down, but still people drive cars not hover boards and everyone still eats at The Olive Garden, although God knows why. Still, if you are separated by two years you cannot simply meet for dinner, I guess, even if you both show up at the same restaurant at 6:30. It's those darned two years, I suppose. It's hard to grasp.
Still, the director made sure that every so often the couple meet before they knew what would happen later, like back when they were both living in the same year, so we can see them kiss. Nobody explains how Kate got two years ahead of Alex, and nobody explains how they have the same dog. Yes, the very same dog lives with both of them. It's odd, to be sure, but also oddly compelling to watch. I would say you should pour yourself a glass of wine, or maybe smoke some pot and just try to figure out if Alex is dead or alive at the end. I think he's alive, but his brother thinks he's dead.
Christopher Plummer adds gravitas as Alex's very famous, very grouchy architect father who withheld love and attention from him as a child and thus screwed up his whole life. Parents -- the true devils in cinema!
A time-travel romantic drama/fantasy also starring Sandra Bullock, right away you know we are not talking rocket science. But oddly enough, The Lake House (released in 2004) did turn out to be rather rocket-scientific, if for no other reason than the plot involves time and space and how we relate to them, no easy subject to comprehend. This conundrum is covered much more coherently in a novel called "Time and Again," by Jack Finney, which I highly recommend. (If you have not read it, just stop reading this and go to Amazon right now and order it... I'll give you a few minutes and find a picture to post while you're gone.)
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| The Lake House with the lake in the background and the magical mailbox in the foreground. |
They exchange letters daily and fall in love, even though Kate is living "in the future." Ha! What future -- very little changes in two years except maybe the Twin Towers fell down, but still people drive cars not hover boards and everyone still eats at The Olive Garden, although God knows why. Still, if you are separated by two years you cannot simply meet for dinner, I guess, even if you both show up at the same restaurant at 6:30. It's those darned two years, I suppose. It's hard to grasp.
Still, the director made sure that every so often the couple meet before they knew what would happen later, like back when they were both living in the same year, so we can see them kiss. Nobody explains how Kate got two years ahead of Alex, and nobody explains how they have the same dog. Yes, the very same dog lives with both of them. It's odd, to be sure, but also oddly compelling to watch. I would say you should pour yourself a glass of wine, or maybe smoke some pot and just try to figure out if Alex is dead or alive at the end. I think he's alive, but his brother thinks he's dead.
Christopher Plummer adds gravitas as Alex's very famous, very grouchy architect father who withheld love and attention from him as a child and thus screwed up his whole life. Parents -- the true devils in cinema!
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