The Lake House (2006)

The Lake House arrives from 2006, a year when a romance could still be built on a mailbox and a two-year temporal gap without anyone demanding an explanation. Alejandro Agresti directs Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock as an architect and a physician exchanging letters across time, and the whole enterprise rests on the notion that longing is sufficient. It is a remake of the South Korean film Il Mare, transplanted to Chicago's architectural glories, and it carries itself with the soft, unhurried confidence of a picture that has no interest in arguing with anyone. That is its most distinguishing feature.

On the matter of progressive sensibilities, the film is nearly barren, and this appears to be a question of constitution, not omission. Bullock's Kate is a working physician who sheds a controlling fiancé, a gesture that registers as ordinary romantic housekeeping instead of a statement. Shohreh Aghdashloo appears as Kate's mentor, and the cast otherwise remains a study in Chicago whiteness. There is no racial commentary, no environmental concern, no critique of the architecture trade's money, no inquiry into bodies or minds. The film has no interest in any of it.

What remains is a gentle, sentimental piece of work that delivers its themes through mood and Rachel Portman's piano, never through sermon. It does not lecture. It does not scold. It asks the audience to accept that a mailbox can bend physics and that two attractive people deserve each other across a paradox. Ebert liked it. Most critics did not. The film performed modestly and won a Teen Choice award for a kiss. There is very little here for the cultural archaeologist to excavate, which is itself a finding. Some vintages are simply quiet.