The Lake House
Wow. I've just read A O Scott's review of The Lake House, and, - wow! - it's quite positive! I expected The New York Times to figure out some way of trashing the movie, which indeed would be "deeply silly" and "completely preposterous" if it weren't for the stars, Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves, reunited for the first time since Speed - another improbable movie that they made irresistible.
"Hijacking a bus? Are they crazy?" As it happened, I saw Speed in a large, boisterous theatre the day after OJ's wild ride. The audience could not possibly have been more into the movie.
Ms Bullock and Mr Reeves made hijacking a bus work, and, in The Lake House, they make epistolary time travel work as well. I trust that no one will waste any effort on Primer-style "timelines": this is simply not a movie to be figured out. Or, at the risk of being a little brutal, let me say that it's a movie that only somebody on the autistic side would feel the need to analyze. The Lake House reminds us of what it means to be a real film star. Real film stars can move mountains - and they can also communicate across timelines. And they can make you forget your objections to the "thesis." Completely. They can make you want to bury them, in a Viking funeral!
The "thesis" of The Lake House is that Dr Kate Forster, who has just moved out of the eponymous villa at the beginning of the film - and it is a villa - engages in a correspondence with Alex Wyler, whom she believes to be her successor tenant but who in fact arranged for her to rent the place two years earlier. Kate lives in 2006; Alex in 2004, but they can fall in love anyway, through the power of well-written letters - a hat is duly tipped to Miss Austen - and in the end the film is wonderfully clever, if not very convincing, about resolving the tension between impossibility and romance. Alex is the son of the architect who built the house, "with his own hands" (unlikely, knowing Christopher Plummer). He is also, as the half of the romance who lives in the past, capable of learning about Kate from her letters. The scene in which he contrives to meet her, knowing that she is the love of his life but unwilling to shock her with the incredible manner in which he has gotten to know her - and his decency, here, is really aimed at us - is one of the loveliest romantic moments that I know of. Kate and Alex are dancing, and you can see at the same time that, while she's falling for him because he's so manifestly in love with her, he's also holding back big time. It's an astonishing scene, and, despite the fact that every trope of Love Affair-type romance has been utilized, if not exploited, by The Lake House, the scene is also absolutely new. I can't believe I'm saying this, but, in his beautifully registered restraint, Keanu Reeves is at least momentarily the equal of Cary Grant.
Perhaps the success of The Lake House owes to the fact that, even in today's Hollywood, its principals are very unusual actors. Mr Reeves has obviously worked hard and not without success to develop his interpretive breadth. In two recent films, The Gift and Thumbsucker, he explored his dark side, and also his capacity to look malignant and unattractive, without losing his strength as an opener. (I know; I'm speaking prematurely.) His Alex Wyler is a rougher-edged lover than any he has played in the past; Mr Reeves displays a lot of ambiguous good-old-boy toothy smiles in The Lake House, and as the son of a brilliant architect who has himself pursued upscale contracting simply in order to build things he is utterly convincing. As for Ms Bullock, she has a peculiar knack, one that I'm not sure that any actress has displayed in the past. Again and again, in movie after movie - don't we ever learn? - she convinces us that her characters have absolutely no idea how beautiful they are, that it's entirely reasonable that they don't try to trade on their good looks; and, at the same time, she carries herself with the dignity of a woman who knows that she deserves the best, or at any rate is someone who won't settle for less. There is a beguilingly honorable modesty in her performances that will excite anyone who has ever thrilled to the story of Cinderella (in any of its versions). Sometimes, what these actors have to bring to a given movie is wasted. But I'm with Mr Scott: The Lake House is a success.