Movies about time travel are always fascinating. The element of surrealism never quite becomes so hackneyed that you don't watch with eager childlike anticipation. True, you don't always care about these characters who time is cruelly teasing with nonlinear love slaps. But you always watch in interest because traveling through time is so much more fun than riding the bus.

Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock reunite for The Lake House, a movie that's as much about time travel as it is about, well, speed. Wouldn't you know, thirteen years later the romantic couple is still concerned about a lack of time and speeding buses. The most heartbreaking thing of all about this weeper was the fact that there was no cameo appearance by Dennis Hopper.

In The Lake House, a lonely doctor played by Sandra Bullock who once lived in a lakeside cottage, begins exchanging love letters with its newest tenant, an unhappy architect played by Keanu Reeves. As it happens, they are separated by fate, and more specifically a time period of 2 years. Alex Wyler lives in 2004, Kate Forster lives in 2006. Not too complicated, right? It is, actually. Particularly, in how they can manage to meet in person if they are truly separated by millions of light years and multiple dimensions. They have met once before, but she didn't know who he was at the time. You see how tricky and adorable things get in romantic comedy slash speculative time stories?

The movie is adorable and tricky, which is a backhanded compliment. Sandra Bullock plays Kate Forster as a sensitive, shy spirit delightfully different from the usual talky neurotic female archetype that's been dominating the romantic comedy genre. While Keanu Reeves brings his usual wooden performance to the party, this time around he also brings a very stoic and almost pained restraint. Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves execute their lonely characterizations beautifully--particularly in scenes with voice over dialogue in which they "write" letters to each other instantaneously.

Originally based on a foreign film called Siworae, the concept is smarter than the traditional romantic comedy, which is presumably what attracted Reeves and Bullock to the project in the first place. It would be a wonderful thing if this film became successful and started a trend of more intellectually stimulating date movies for the new millennium. The Lake House is a clever date movie yet it is never really allowed to surpass the limitations of the time speculative fantasy and romantic comedy genres.

Why does one single mail box, part of a lonely and apparently timeless lakeside cottage, hold the secrets of time travel? We never know. Why does Kate Forster fall so deeply in love with Alex Wyler's letters? Because of the penmanship? We never know, it just happens and we play along

The movie repeatedly references Jane Austen's Persuasion novel, and therein lies the secret to their universal love. They both loved the book, you see. It works nicely as a recurring thread in the story, how characters wait, yearn and sometimes miss out on a good thing. As a halfway realistic romance, however, something tells me it would take more than the love of Jane Austen to unite these two Wintery hearts.

More disturbing is the lack of seriousness the movie devotes to the actual story at hand. There are many funny and poignant scenes that develop thanks to the convoluted time malfunction. However, beyond these scenes the movie comes to no sure conclusion, nor does it invite us on any deep spiritual exploration. The timelessness of the lake house is a plot device and the film conveniently skips around any thought provoking issues the plot twists initially suggest. Not to give away the ending, but it's safe to say that this movie that had so much potential, and two very gifted actors playing interesting characters, promised us much more than it delivered by the final fade out.

These two characters, like much of the population we have to believe, are people who have become disillusioned and isolated at the way traditional romance works. They write love letters back and forth rather quickly as if they are sending AOL instant messages and fire their imaginations with escapist romantic fantasy. The time difference is the perfect metaphor for how many today can love only what is not humanly possible. However, we as the audience never quite escape the romantic fantasy ourselves, and thus never truly fall in love with this movie.

At one point Kate Forster, inspired by a passage in Persuasion, begs Alex to wait for her if their love is true, and supposedly this is the movie's emotional peak. But given that everything is so abstract and annoyingly contrived by that time-warping ending, I felt the need to write a short letter of my own to the two lonely hearts which also worked as a succinct criticism of The Lake House: You know two years is really nothing. Grade: B-