Davechoc
Posts: 75
Joined: 18/4/2006
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CONTAINS SPOILERS
OK this is fairly long, and you might think it a little too long considering The Lake House is a relatively inconsequential film, but I think it has been unfairly treated, plus people have raised time-travel issues which I feel are either ill-thought through or just misunderstood, so here goes.
I think many critics have been unfair to this film. Sure it's a Hollywood romance, but most bad reviews have criticised it for this reason alone - you're supposed to judge a film according to the competence of the actors, script etc., not simply because you don't like the genre, people!
It's no masterpiece, for sure, but I think Bullock, as always, is an engaging lead, even though it is true that Reeves does possibly the worst sneeze in film history, needing a whole new Razzie category to itself. The fact that the two leads are apart for most of the film means that it avoids anything toooo soppy (I say toooo since the way the film is shot and the endless ballads on the soundtrack do teeter into the syrupy a little too often), though I wasn't convinced (as in Empire's review) of the device of having the characters talk their letters out loud as though the other person were sitting next to them, which was just plain odd.
As for the mailbox:
"Why, for instance, does Alex put his first letter to Kate in his own mailbox without knowing that she was going to turn up? However, the hugest mistake - the crux of the whole film - is the date of the traffic accident. The dates we are told and the circumstaces that surround this cannot possibly match. It's also convenient that Kate never remembers Alex's face despite having met in the past at various points (although this is perhaps glossed over with her admission that she doesn't even remember what her first love looked like)." (Moonshine 79)
Firstly, a mailbox of this variety is for receiving and sending post - these sort of houses being in the middle of nowhere - so when Alex puts the first letter to Kate in the mailbox it is intended to be picked up by the postman, with Kate's new address (which she mentions in the letter she left for the new tenant) on it, this being before he knows she's in the future and her building hasn't been built in his time yet. (The fact that we never see the postman is perhaps an odd thing but since this mailbox houses some sort of temporal anomaly that isn't really that significant...)
Secondly, the dates of the accident etc. are quite straightforward. They began communicating as a result of Kate failing to save Alex in the traffic accident, around 14th February 2006/2004, and her returning to the lake house she knows so well for comfort. Since the house is empty she checks the mailbox to see if her note to the new tenant is there, which is when she finds Alex's reply.
It is when she realises (in 2008, her time, by this point) that he was the guy who was killed in front of her on 14th February 2006 that she realises that, the accident occurring at the start of their relationship, he must've figured out from her first letter where she'd be on that date, and come to see her (a fact that he may only have realised when he'd 'caught up' to her, ie on the day of 14th February 2006 his time). Since they are two years apart continually - one hour on in her time is one hour on in his - it is literally a race against time to warn him by posting him a letter in the hope that he would first check her letter which mentions her location, which is in the box in the attic of the lake house (a minor contrivance perhaps but not implausible).
Thirdly, perhaps it is odd that she kisses him at the party and doesn't remember him when he's run over, but then perhaps he was facially injured... and she only saw him briefly as her train was pulling away from the station. I don't recall any other points at which they actually met, besides the ending. After being caught kissing it isn't really likely that he'd be popular with her boyfriend (plus remember her boyfriend mentions that kiss sometime after Kate starts her correspondence with Alex, by which point he has already been killed in her time, and it doesn't sound like she's met him since: Alex hands the keys to the lake house straight to the boyfriend when she's not there).
Critics also point out that the fact that their mail can time-travel through the mailbox is never explained, but this seems to miss the point rather; it is a romantic fantasy, and the mailbox is a device for them to explore their relationship - it's not sci-fi. Suspension of disbelief requires the audience to accept certain elements of the film they are watching without question. If you are going to nitpick, it only really makes sense if you question those elements which still wouldn't make sense even within the context of the world which the film presents. This is why I think it is fine to accept that, for instance, a giant ape and dinosaurs are living on an island in King Kong, but it would be absurd if the human characters were able to fly; the world of the film is presented from the outset as one with a giant ape and dinosaurs (whose continued existence compared to the rest of their extinct species is never satisfactorily explained), but otherwise is like ours, ie without flying humans.
Similarly The Lake House is ostensibly in our world, except with a peculiar mailbox - if you can't accept that, then you can't really accept any film with aliens, time-travel and the like, which are otherwise set in our world (after all, even something as fab as the Back To The Future trilogy only 'explains' the time-travel with pseudo-science; relatively few time-travel films use genuine scientific theories as the basis for their time machines, because real science is: (a) often too abstract and complicated, (b) dull, as a result, and again it is the fun to be had with playing around with gadgets, effects, and putting characters in unfamiliar locations which is the focus, not the realism of the science, plus many which do use actual theory often place it in our time, far ahead of when such technologies could probably be developed. Ditto artificial intelligence, mutants...). The fact that the mailbox is never explained isn't the point; Donnie Darko is arguably a far more opaque film but it is still a deservedly popular and magical one.
For my money, this film dealt with the usual time-travel paradoxes quite cleverly. Firstly is the fact that the characters don't actually time-travel themselves - they are subject to the ordinary flow of time as everyone else - just the mail does. So all the problems with causality and changing history are for the most part neatly avoided (I say for the most part, bear with me...).
This isn't a film with time-lines splitting as characters make different decisions: all the events from 2004-2006 are the same for both of them. The fact that Alex begins communicating is what causes him to end up going to the party and meeting Kate, before she knows who he is, and ultimately being responsible for Kate moving into the lake house (ie if they hadn't begun communicating, he wouldn't have met her, and given the keys to her boyfriend, and she wouldn't have sent the letter that began the communication. This is of course circular and so it is interesting to consider how such a circle could have begun - he needed to have given her the lake house keys in order for her to live there and then leave the letter which he needed to get to know her and give her the lake house keys... etc. etc. Nevertheless this sort of mind-boggling circle is a common consequence in time-travel films and is hardly a reason to discount them. The film Somewhere in Time (1980) with Christopher Reeve has a watch which is passed between characters in different times; Reeves' character, from the present, gives it to Jane Seymour's in the past when the latter is a young woman, and she gives it back to him when she is old, back in the present, before he has travelled through time to meet her in the past. Thus each character only has the watch because the other gave it to them - where does it come from? The book Time Travel in Einstein's Universe (J. Richard Gott) has much information about the subject as a whole).
The events of those two years are self-fulfilling. A crucial marker of this is when Kate's boyfriend mentions the kiss at the party - this occurs in the film before we see Alex go to said party, and since we follow Alex and Kate two years apart at the same rate, it follows that she remembers the event before Alex has made it happen, so to speak; it is not a case of him causing it to happen and new memories popping into her head as he does so - it is inevitable that he will intervene in her life 2004-2006 since she already remembers him doing so.
Of course, as I said, this doesn't apply consistently. At the end of the film Kate essentially cheats death and brings Alex back by warning him not to come and meet her, and meet her instead in 2008 when she knows both who he is and has realised - only when she thinks he's died - that he is the one for her. This is clearly an intervention that changes history. Hers doesn't change, since he doesn't come and meet her 2006-2008 and so from her point of view the whole letters saga unfolds the same, including him missing the date etc., though for different reasons (ie he deliberately misses it so her history doesn’t change, rather than because he had been killed; again there are no 'new' memories popping into her head as her past shifts). His of course does, but since he is two years behind her anyway he has no past to be re-written; only a future which unfolds differently to how it would have done.
The fact that Alex is in the world 2006-2008 at all throws up questions of how his presence would affect history, but these are issues for sci-fi films to explore, not romantic fantasies, where it is the lives of the two leads that we are concerned about. Similarly he could, in theory, begin writing letters from his 2008 self, having met Kate, to his 2006 self, but again this is an irrelevant point in this sort of film, plus given the premise it may be imagined that the mailbox ceases to be a time-travel portal once 2008 Alex has met 2008 Kate and everything is settled.
Other criticisms - why doesn't Kate give him the lottery numbers, why don't they tell scientists about the mailbox, etc. etc. - are a little silly; it simply isn't that sort of film, and you might as well ask why we don't see X-Men turning invisible and spying on people undressing, or stealing chocolate through psychic ability; you might suppose this would happen in the real world but then this isn't exactly the real world (as neither is the one of X-Men, though it is identical in many respects).
Yes it may have been a rather more bittersweet contemplation about time and missed chances if she discovered he'd died at the end after it was too late to stop it, (plus more consistent since neither of their histories would be changed) but then this is Hollywood; it was hardly a twist ending, especially since from the moment she witnesses the crash you know it will be significant. Nonetheless I was pleasantly surprised by this film, and I think people haven’t really considered their objections carefully.
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