‘The Lake House’ feels strangely empty

Improbable love stories are rarely as improbable as “The Lake House,” a curiously flat time-travel tale starring Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock as would-be lovers separated by two years.

He exists in 2004. She exists in 2006. They communicate through a magical mailbox that somehow moves messages back and forth between the two years. The red flag goes up, all by itself, whenever they have a letter to send to each other.

At other times, they seem able to communicate with each other by telepathy, or by speaking into the wind in a public park. Occasionally they’re able to share the same space at the same time, even dancing and kissing while their betrayed partners can register only bewilderment.

Quick facts Starring: Sandra Bullock, Keanu Reeves, Dylan Walsh, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Christopher Plummer Director: Alejandro Agresti Run time: 1 hour, 38 minutes MPAA rating: PG

Ask no questions and the screenwriter, David Auburn (“Proof”), will offer no explanations that make sense. It’s mostly a matter of faith, and if you can’t conjure it up out of your current stock of willing disbelief, it’s unlikely that Argentine director Alejandro Agresti (“Valentin”) will be able to shove you in that direction.

For one thing, the chemistry between Reeves and Bullock is nearly non-existent. Although they’re reunited for the first time since the 1994 blockbuster, “Speed,” that was an action film that required minuscule amounts of flirting. It never depended on their feelings for each other.

Her specialty is wistful irony. His is impenetrable stoicism. Put them together in a romantic drama and the result is predictably inert. Put them together in a romantic drama in which the story requires that they stay apart for long stretches, years even, and their relationship becomes all but impossible.

Everything depends on their ability to fall for each other through a series of increasingly passionate and desperate love letters. But Bullock is so intent on maintaining a stiff upper lip, and Reeves seems so determined to suppress emotion, that the movie misses the intensity of a great and necessary love story. The soundtrack’s insistent use of romantic ballads, from “Young at Heart” to “Almost Like Being in Love,” just underlines the lack of emotion.

“The Lake House” is a remake of a six-year-old South Korean film, “Il Mare” or “Siworae,” that set essentially the same story in an apartment house in the late 1990s. In the new film, the apartment has been transformed into a luxurious glass house built on stilts on a lake near Chicago.

Alex Wyler, Reeves’ character, is an architect, and so is his estranged father (Christopher Plummer), who built the lake house. Dr. Kate Forster, Bullock’s character, once lived there, but she’s taken a job at a Chicago hospital. Dylan Walsh is the persistent boyfriend she doesn’t quite love, and Shoreh Aghdashloo brings her brash authority to the role of Kate's doctor friend.

The most colorful character is Kate’s mother, whose downright sisterly heart-to-heart talks with Kate are directly related to a turning point in Kate’s relationship with Alex. Played by Dutch actress Willeke van Ammelrooy (Antonia in the Oscar-winning “Antonia’s Line”), she suggests a talent for enjoying life that is largely missing from the other characters.

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