The Lake House
If you love science fiction & fantasy, it will be nearly impossible for you to watch The Lake House without screaming. My advice? Go, but have a couple of stiff drinks first. You don't just need to suspend your disbelief for this movie; you need to suspend it over a bottomless pit.
It's not that I don't recommend the movie--in fact I do, because it has an unabashedly corny sweetness and old-fashioned charm that makes it a welcome antidote to Hollywood's steady diet of blood-in-the-streets action/adventure movies. And since the movie industry's only "romantic" offering at the moment is The Breakup (hey, look, it's the viciousness of War of the Roses recycled for a whole new generation!), it's nice to have a date movie where nobody wants to kill each other.
But if you read speculative fiction, and especially if you also write it, you recognize that it must have internal rules. The mark of a bad storyline in this genre is not one with improbable rules (that's actually par for the course), it's one that violates its own rules.The Lake House violates its own rules in such an egregious way that I wanted to throw my cup of overpriced cola at the screen. Even though it resulted in the "right" ending, I didn't approve of the route they took to get there.
To give a non-spoiler example of this: The character Kate (in 2006) writes wistfully that she misses the trees at the lake house. The character Alex (who receives her letter in his own time, 2004, via their magic mailbox) promptly packs a tree in the back of his pickup, drives to where Kate's condo building is still being constructed, and plants a tree near the front doors. Meanwhile, Kate arrives home...and sees the tree appear where it had never been before.
Um, no. The mailbox at the lake house was previously established as having astounding time-spanning powers; Kate's urban condo was not. If Alex planted a tree in 2004, Kate would have seen it there the first day she moved into the building in 2006. It would not have been missing when she wrote her letter, then magically appear afterward. Blatant violation of the movie's own rules. As is the ending, which I will not describe here.
I still enjoyed the movie; I'm a hopeless romantic sap. But the rule violations kept me from ever lapsing into a completely happy state of willing disbelief. Again and again, in small ways and large, the movie jolted me out of the story with its "Hey, wait a minute--!" moments. That's a cheat to the viewer (or in a story, the reader). The Time Traveler's Wife plays straight and fair with the audience; The Lake House does not.
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wordswoman) wrote,
