The Lake House movie review & film summary (2006)

Enough of the plot and its paradoxes. What I respond to in the movie is its fundamental romantic impulse. It makes us hope these two people will somehow meet. All during the movie, we're trying to do the math: It should be possible, given enough ingenuity, for them to eventually spend 2007 together, especially since he can theoretically keep the letters he received from her in 2004 and ask her out on a date and show them to her, although by then she'd know she wrote them -- or would she?

They do arrange one date, which involves them in some kind of time-loop misunderstanding, I think. She later understands what happened, but I don't think I do. I mean, I understand the event she refers to, but not whether it is a necessary event or can be prevented.

A great deal depends on the personalities involved. Sandra Bullock is an enormously likable actor in the right role, and so is Keanu Reeves, although here they're both required to be marginally depressed because of events in their current (but not simultaneous) lives. Many of his problems circle around his father, Louis Wyler (Christopher Plummer), a famous Chicago architect. The old man is an egocentric genius who designed the Lake House, which his son dislikes because, like Louis himself, it lives in isolation; there aren't even any stairs to get down to the water.

Alex is an architect himself, currently debasing himself with suburban condos, and Kate is a doctor whose confidante is an older mentor at the hospital (Shoreh Aghdashloo). Alex has a confidant, too, his brother Henry (Ebon Moss-Bachrach). A plot like this makes confidants more or less obligatory, since the protagonists have so little opportunity to confide in each other, except for their mysterious ability to transform a written correspondence into a conversation. Now about that dog: Dogs live outside of time, don't you think?