Movies

01:00 AM EDT on Friday, June 16, 2006

BY MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal Arts Writer

The Lake House is a romantic fantasy hinging on a time warp that may drive you crazy before the plot's contrived secret is revealed at the end.

Following a recent preview screening, people left the theater and gathered in knots in the lobby and in the parking lot to try to connect all the plot's dots. "Now was he . . . " and "How did she . . ." could be heard as moviegoers argued among themselves about what they had just seen. On the one hand, you have to hand it to Argentine director Alejandro Agresti and Pulitzer Prize- Tony Award-winning writer David Auburn (Proof) for coming up with a film that stirs such emotions in audiences, even if they are confused. On the other hand, if people aren't sure about what they've just seen, have the filmmakers failed?

The Lake House, based on the 2000 South Korean film Il Mare, depends a great deal on audience good will, something that's enhanced by the subtle performances of Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves, together for the first time in a dozen years since their box office smash Speed.

The plot is certainly Matrix-like as it tries to build a romance between two people who are living in the same place, but in different times, sort of like the Christopher Reeve film Somewhere in Time, but not so far apart in decades. Only two years separate the lives of Bullock's Kate Forester, a harried doctor, and Reeves' Alex Wyler, a talented architect still living in the shadow of his demanding, more celebrated architect father (Christopher Plummer).

It was Dad who designed and built the lake house of the title, an improbable glass-walled home on stilts on a lake not far from Chicago. At the start of the film Kate has just moved out of the house to take a job at a big-city hospital, leaving it in pristine condition. She leaves the next tenant, who turns out to be Alex, a note in the mailbox about how much she loved the place.

However, when he moves in he finds a rundown place that has been abandoned for years. He responds to her letter, mentioning the dumpy condition of the place. She thinks he's toying with her and responds by leaving a note in his mailbox asking "What day is it there?" Why, April 14, 2004, he shoots back. She replies, growing increasingly annoyed, that it's April 14, 2006.

Thus begins the movie's air of mystery, compounded by the fact that their letter-writing campaign is bringing them closer together.

Yet how can this romance ever be consummated? They live two years apart.

Because of the time difference that would play havoc with the post office (her new apartment building wasn't even constructed yet in 2004), all the letter exchanges are done in the mailbox in front of the lake house. In the oddest sequence in this very odd film, she puts a note in the box with its flag up to signify that he's got mail. Then, some unseen hand lowers the flag and, when she looks inside, there's his response from two years in the past. And back and forth it goes. It's cute, but definitely oddball.

The problem in all this is that one is so caught up in trying to figure out the film's time warp conundrum and how it could possibly ever be resolved, that the actors are overwhelmed by all the second guessing in the audience.

Getting Alex and Kate together, though two years apart -- something that is very necessary in order to give their romance some grounding -- is accomplished by contriving to have him turn up as a last-minute guest at her surprise birthday party in 2004. He's the unknown mystery man at the party who, nevertheless, turns out to be the one who shares the same wavelength as she. That's fine, soulmate-wise, but it seems manipulative. So is the way in which the whole time-warp issue is resolved by Auburn.

Although it's all spelled out plainly, there are still enough nagging little questions left over about the time question and how it was all accomplished that you may leave the theater scratching your head. In a movie that's supposed to be super romantic, this is not a good thing.

** 1/2

The Lake House

Starring: Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock, Dylan Walsh, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Christopher Plummer.

Rated: PG, contains violence.