The Lake House
Length: Single
Studio: Warner Bros. Pictures
Rated: PG
Website: http://thelakehousemovie.warnerbros.com/
Release Date: 2006-06-16
Cast: Sandra Bullock, Keanu Reeves, Dylan Walsh, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Christopher Plummer
Director: Alejandro Agresti
Screenwriter: David Auburn
Music Score: Rachel Portman
WorkNameSort: Lake House, The
Our Rating: 2.00
There are signs of intelligent and suspenseful filmmaking in The Lake House that cleverly play on its time-transcending conceit. But these few bits and spurts of stirring cinema are otherwise drowned in a silly muck of cobbled-together quotations from more notable films and books. Due to a hiccup in the time-space continuum, a home’s 2004 resident (Keanu Reeves) is linked with its owner (Sandra Bullock) two years into the future. Because of the house’s magic timeless mailbox, the lakeside Lothario and his lonely lover communicate as pen pals without actually seeing each other (The Shop Around the Corner), while Reeves’ hero desperately strives to manipulate time and meet his one true love (Somewhere in Time). The more literal allusions include clips from Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious and Jane Austen’s Persuasion, a book reduced to a theme of time-trapped despair simply to mirror this narrative’s wishes. And let’s not forget that The Lake House itself is a remake of an obscure Korean film, Siworae. All we’re left with is the novelty of seeing two over-the-hill stars of ’90s movies reuniting, without the bus and a gonzo Dennis Hopper. (PG)
This article appears in Jun 14-20, 2006.