For a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, David Auburn turns in a surprisingly pedestrian script in this time-warp romance.
By: Bob Brown
In this boy-nearly-meets-girl film, the architecture threatens to overwhelm the love story. There are some marvelous contributors all down the line, but it has to depend on chemistry between two people: Alex Wyler (Keanu Reeves), a small-time Chicago architect, and Kate Forster (Sandra Bullock), a doctor in a busy downtown hospital.
The improbable problem is the absence of face time, at least in a conventional sense. Alex finds a note in the mailbox of a lakefront house he has just rented in the country. The note is from a previous tenant, Kate, who asks the tenant after her to forward her mail. But something’s wrong. The note is dated 2006.
Thinking it’s a joke, Alex responds that it is 2004 and the house had been unoccupied before he arrived to fix it up. But there’s no help for it, and the two begin to realize they are corresponding across time. What else is there to do but ask about each other and share each other’s hopes, fears and sorrows?
They are both adrift with unsatisfactory love lives, and struggling with home issues. Of course, like modern day chat-room e-mailers, they fall in love and want to meet each other. Other problems crop up. Reserving a table at a swank Chicago restaurant is hard enough without having to figure in the two-year time warp.
The otherworldly romance-at-a-distance feels much like that between the characters played by Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore in Ghost, or Bruce Willis and Olivia Williams in The Sixth Sense. But it’s not spirit-to-spirit; it’s just the way things are in the modern Korean source for this movie, Siworae (2000). Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Auburn (Proof) has adapted Ji-na Yeo’s script from the Korean and set the story in Chicago, his hometown.
It’s a city of great architecture, and the cinematography by Alar Kivilo (The Glass House) shows it off like some travel brochure. Windy city? Howling blizzards in winter? Forget about it. Everything looks like a postcard. Wish you were here.
Especially fetching is the intriguing lake house itself. It looks like a Philip Johnson creation that took a detour through the Arts and Crafts period. It’s a glass box on stilts. The architect is Alex’s father, Simon Wyler (marvelously played by Christopher Plummer). He is the kind of self-absorbed genius who neglected his family to create great works. One recalls observations by some of Louis Kahn’s colleagues in Nathaniel Kahn’s mixed tribute to his father, My Architect.
To come to terms with his father, Alex inhabits his most noted creation and gets inside him, so to speak. Despite the wealth of great architecture in the Chicago environs, the filmmakers could not find exactly what they wanted for this key setting. So the production designer, Nathaniel Crowley (Batman Begins), a third-generation architect, designed it from scratch and supervised its construction.
Kate’s Chicago of 2006 is more mundane. She lives in a splashy new high rise without a tree in sight. She longs for the solitude she left behind at the lake house. Her confidant is her hospital supervisor, Dr. Anna Klyczynski, played by the incredible Iranian actress Shohreh Aghdashloo, who has a voice like liquid smoke. Now a more interesting pairing would be Dr. Klyczynski and Alex Wyler, two strong, complementary personalities. They do meet, but not under the right circumstances.
Another notable actress is the Dutch Willeke van Ammelrooy, who plays Kate’s widowed mother. One keeps expecting something more to come of her character. Not much does. In fact, Plummer, Aghdashloo, and van Ammelrooy are the strongest presences in the film and would outshine the featured pair if given the room.
Reeves and Bullock haven’t appeared together since Speed (1994), where they had too much on their hands to pay attention to the color of each other’s eyes. A speeding bus loaded with explosives is not a good venue for romance. Now the tempo is decidedly dialed down and a slow buildup to heat is called for.
For a prize-winning playwright, Auburn turns in a surprisingly pedestrian script. The lines sometimes land just the other side of silly, as when Kate describes the things she loves about Chicago. It sounds like a personals ad. Then Alex takes her on an architect’s tour of his favorite spots, writing out a walking map for her. Still, not having the original to compare puts us at a disadvantage.
The other touchstone for the film is Jane Austen’s Persuasion, which is Kate’s favorite novel. If the lake house is the physical connection between Kate and Alex, a symbol of their mutual transparency, the book is their inspirational guide, pointing to the importance of seizing opportunities before they slip away. A ragged paperback is a key plot point in the film. Once again, Jane Austen comes to Hollywood’s rescue.
One is tempted to say that people who rent glass houses probably deserve each other. Who else would put up with the lack of privacy, not to mention the paltry closet space?
Rated PG for some language and a disturbing image.