Ill-Informed Gadfly

Shout-out to 91 Seconds on Film coordinator Tom Dumontier, who told me I didn’t have to review the stupid pirate movie. I celebrated by going to see the chaste, space-time-continuum-rupturing romance of the summer. I’m weird, I know.

Imagine the pitch meeting for “The Lake House”: “It’s like ‘The Notebook,’ with time travel!”

This is a silly movie, but a harmless and intermittently enjoyable one. Wait. “Silly” doesn’t quite cut it. It’s one of the most baldly absurd premises I’ve ever seen. As David Letterman put it, over and over again, with an embarrassed Sandra Bullock on his show: It’s a magic mailbox. Oh yes. Keanu Reeves puts a letter in the mailbox in 2004, puts the flag up, and Sandra Bullock gets the letter in 2006. And vice versa. This idea is treated deadly seriously, without so much as a wink.

“The Lake House” is adapted from a Korean movie. I am learning that such gimmicks are common in Korean popular cinema. I am also told by my wife that Koreans prefer their bubbly love stories to end tragically.

Now I’m going to discuss the ending, so SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER.

The problem with “The Lake House,” it seems to me, is that the “secret” that prevents Keanu and Sandra from getting together at the same time is so obvious. It’s right there in front of you. Early on, Sandra, playing a doctor, sees a guy get hit by a bus right in front of her, and tries, unsuccessfully, to save him. We never see this guy up close, but it’s clearly Keanu. So the guy she’s falling for not only exists two years ago, he’s dead in the present. Presumably the accident was so grotesque that his face was crushed beyond recognition, because Sandra knows what Keanu looks like, thanks to the fact that the 2004 Keanu has visited (and made out with) the 2004 Sandra. But this PG-rated movie has not so much as a single curse word, so we get none of the gory details. Meanwhile, it takes the movie forever to get around to revealing what many viewers must already know. (When they’re done well, I’m not good at spotting twists. I don’t view movies as puzzles that I have to solve.)

There are a few ways to resolve the Keanu-is-dead problem, but the movie picks the most obvious (and unconditionally “happy”) one. I wonder if the Korean version did the same; I sort of doubt it, but it does not appear to be available on DVD.

So I wish the central gimmick had been handled more gracefully, but beyond that I think the movie plays out nicely. Sandra and Keanu clearly get on well together, and while Keanu gives you a vintage dose of his famous woodenness when he’s reading his letters in voice-over, he seems as relaxed as he’s ever been on screen. He’s also unafraid to look a bit doughy and doesn’t worry about hiding the discoloration on his upper lip. He almost looks like a regular guy. Keanu’s career choices indicate he has a jones for saccharine love stories, and they seem to suit his demeanor much more than high-concept thrillers. When he’s in those films, it’s up to the directors to use his discomfort to the story’s advantage, as the Wachowski brothers did so brilliantly in the first “Matrix.”

And Bullock, with her low-maintenance haircut, de-glams nicely as well. “The Lake House” is lush but the people it shows you are almost ordinary. I dig that. Don’t misunderstand: I love movies about fabulously attractive, impossibly witty people. Give me Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn or William Powell and Myrna Loy any day. But in the case of “The Lake House,” the unfabulousness of the leads makes the premise easier to swallow. It’s still a gigantic horse pill, but I can take it.