Review: The Lake House

Interesting premise for this one: two people live in the same lake house, one in 2004, the other in 2006, and yet, with the help of a mailbox-cum-time portal, they are able to write letters to each other and fall in love. As sci-fi love stories go, that’s not too bad of an idea.

The pacing was a little slow, but it worked for the movie. The whole thing felt like a lazy fall day, with a touch of melancholy, reflecting the situations of both of the characters – meandering through their lives working through the sadness of their situations. It also set you up perfectly for the ending.

***SPOILER ALERT***

***SPOILER ALERT*** (Don’t read further if you don’t want to know the end.)

Or rather, it set you up perfectly for what the ending should have been. There’s no way to explain this without giving away the entire movie, but it’s rather predictable anyway, so I hope you’ll forgive me. [tag]Sandra Bullock[/tag] plays a doctor who, soon after moving out of the lake house, witnesses a fatal car accident, which triggers her to contemplate life and revisit the lake house, where she feels at peace. It’s at that point that the time-warping mailbox kicks in and gets the main plot going. Later, at the end, it’s revealed that [tag]Keanu Reeves[/tag], the man she has been writing to across time, is the man killed in that accident. So his death is what prompts her to go to the house in the first place, which allows them to “meet” and fall in love. However, at the end of the movie, she manages to prevent him from being killed and they both live happily ever after. Happiness abounds, but it totally undermines the logic of the movie. It’s a pure paradox: he doesn’t die, so there is no impetus for her to go to the lake house, and therefore never meets him to begin with, and hence she can’t save him (let alone fall in love with him). It erases the entire movie.

For this movie to work, it needed to end with her sitting by the mailbox waiting, in vain, for him to show up. It would have been perfectly in keeping with the tone of the film, and I’m very disappointed they didn’t have the guts to do it.

(For the record, my wife completely disagrees with me. She likes the happy ending.)

While I liked much of the movie, the lameness of the ending seriously hurts the film in my opinion, so I can only give it a 2-1/2 star rating.

[tags]movie, review, paradox, sci-fi, time travel, love[/tags]

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