When Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock were first paired in Speed, it really boosted their careers.
Keanu was projected as an action star and did the The Matrix series, while Sandra starred in endearing comedies like While You Were Sleeping and Miss Congeniality. When Keanu refused to do Speed 2, it flopped.
Now, they’re together again in a fantasy-romance that is the remake of a Korean movie made in 2000, Siworae or Il Mare, which is probably the same film which inspired GMA Films’ romance about calendar-challenged lovers, Moments Of Love.
We haven’t seen the original, so we don’t know what changes Argentinian director Alejandro Agresti (Valentin, The Act In Question) and his scriptwriter David Auburn (Proof) made in the Hollywood version. But judging from the finished product, we daresay that Moments Of Love is an even more affecting well-told love story than this one.
The movie starts with Kate Forster (Sandra), a doctor, departing from the glass house of the title, perched on stilts over Lake Michigan, to work in a Chicago hospital. She leaves a letter in its mailbox requesting the next tenant to forward her mail to her new address and apologizing for the paw prints her dog left behind.
Alex Wyler (Keanu), an architect, moves in and sees Kate’s letter, but he doesn’t see any paw prints, although a dog does appear later to keep him company.
The two lonely hearts start exchanging notes through a time-traveling mailbox whose red flag goes up and down like magic to indicate that they are receiving new letters. Alex lives in 2004 while Kate lives in 2006, unlike the lovers in Moments Of Love who have a 50-year difference.
To enjoy this kind of vehicle, you have to accept it mainly as a whimsical fairy tale since if you’d insist on logic, you will only spoil the narrative. But even if you buy its basic idea, the script should still try to give it a semblance of reality and credibility for us to somehow relish it.
The first kink for us is the fact that we live in the era of the Internet and cellphones. It is so easy for Alex or Kate to research on the Net about each other, and yet they don’t do it. Also, they would have simplified things if they’d just write down each other’s cell-phone numbers or put a copy of their photos inside the mailbox. If the romance was set in the ’50s or ’60s, the story would have been more credible.
But if you’re willing to overlook its lapses, you might still enjoy the film as the chemistry between Keanu and Sandra remains very appealing and they manage to sustain the human element in this fantasy love story.
The trouble with the movie is that it aims for more profundity with subplots which are ne-ver fully realized. Kate is given her own boyfriend, uptight lawyer Morgan (Dylan Walsh), but whatever happens to them is never made clear. Alex has a strained relationship with his father Simon (Christopher Plummer), a more accomplished architect, and this father-and-son drama only distracts us from the movie’s main focus, which should be the story of two lovers trying to connect across time.
These pretensions to family conflicts only bog the film down and make it so slow-moving and even less convincing as the story plods along.
Sandra takes her role as the sad single career woman too seriously that she looks so glum and passionless throughout most of The Lake House, failing to supply the energy the picture so badly needs even when she’s playing chess with her dog.
Keanu fares better as the architect who gets more upbeat when he feels that true love is coming into his life, especially after he gets a copy of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, which Sandra leaves behind in a train station. Fairly adequate in supporting roles are Christopher Plummer as Keanu’s imperious dad who built the lake house many years ago for his mom and Shohreh Agdashloo (House Of Sand And Fog) as Sandra’s doctor friend and understanding boss.
Don’t worry, though, as the vehicle has the obligatory and conventional happy ending. Still, it feels so tacked-on, only the truly gullible will be satisfied with it.
What the film really succeeds in doing is displaying the beautiful architecture of the facades of various homes and buildings in Chicago that are shown here in abundance.
They’re definitely even more wonderful than the glass lake house referred to in the title. And if only for that, the movie may still be worth seeing.
Owie Smowie, watch na watch na ako!
And The Most Important Man In My Life.
…simply because, they’re worth missing. Love you all!
