Bullock, Reeves plumb a deep lake of emotion'Lake House' takes its time with stars

In the age of instant-messaging, we're offered a love story about pen pals who relish the delayed gratification of touching hearts before touching flesh?

Such is The Lake House, an enjoyably sudsy romance starring a moody Keanu Reeves, a broody Sandra Bullock, and the titular structure - a jewel box of glass and steel perched on stilts over Lake Michigan.

There's just one little wrinkle: a wrinkle in time. Kate (Bullock), a doctor, lives in 2006, while Alex (Reeves), an architect, exists in 2004.

The rabbit hole between their parallel worlds is - what else? - a mailbox at the isolated house just north of Chicago where both of them live - although not at the same time. As Kate and Alex try to reach across this time-space discontinuum, theirs is the ultimate long-distance relationship.

Based on a 2000 South Korean film called Il Mare, The Lake House is similar in theme to the telefilm The Love Letter, in which an antique rolltop desk is the portal through which a 20th-century guy communicates with a 19th-century gal.

If all humans accelerate toward the future at a rate of 60 minutes per hour, then Kate's challenge would be to find the reverse gear to physically meet Alex, right?

Not in the story adapted by screenwriter David Auburn (the playwright of Proof). Here the physics of time travel is arbitrary. Sometimes, the pen pals communicate by letter sent across two calendar years; at other times they exist in the same time, same year, and meet through a pet mutt. Are there no rules for traveling between 2004 and 2006? By contrast, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, in which the slackers traveled across the centuries via a telephone booth, is a model of narrative concision.

Although frustrated by the screenwriter's failure to create consistent rules of time travel, I was transported by director Alejandro Agresti's ability to elicit performances of nuance and emotion from the actors better known as Neo and Miss Congeniality.

Agresti, who is from Argentina, isn't bound by the Hollywood convention of hurrying the plot forward in every scene. He lets his characters breathe, stew and yearn. He gives you time to connect with the principals in order that you invest in their outcome. In one nice passage, Kate uses a letter from Alex as a tourist map of Chicago, which allows Agresti to indulge his eye for architectural details that most other directors would miss.

I liked the human rhythms of his movie, appreciated watching an extended sequence of Bullock and Reeves sitting on a porch talking. The scene clocks in at about three minutes and there are no cuts, just two people weathering an emotional storm, then enjoying the sudden break in the clouds when the sunshine streams through.

When was the last time two American screen actors exhibited so many microclimates of mood? Probably not since Lost in Translation has a director let the audience enjoy a couple of characters sitting around talking, sharing regret, rueful laughter, longing. It's refreshing to see the much-maligned Reeves show many colors in his acting palette. And the subdued Bullock is an excellent complement, the puzzle piece that squares off his jigsaw personality.

This movie about an apparent wormhole in time wormed its way under my skin.

Contact movie critic Carrie Rickey at 215-854-5402 or crickey@phillynews.com. Read her recent work at http://go.philly.com/

carrierickey.

The Lake House

*** (out of four stars)

Produced by Doug Davison and Roy Lee, directed by Alejandro Agresti, written by David Auburn, adapted from the script for the film Siworae written by Eun-Jeong Kim and Ji-na Yeo, photography by Alar Kivilo, music by Rachel Portman, distributed by Warner Bros.

Running time:

Kate Forster. . . Sandra Bullock

Alex Wyler. . . Keanu Reeves

Morgan. . . Dylan Walsh

Anna. . . Shohreh Aghdashloo

Simon Wyler. . . Christopher Plummer

Parent's guide: PG (profanity, a disturbing image)

Playing at: area theaters