There's the great monologue in Welles' Citizen Kane in which Everett Sloane's Bernstein recalls as a young man seeing a girl on the deck of a ferry passing the one that he is sailing on. "She didn't see me at all," he says, "but I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl." Ships passing in the night.

Pairing fated partners together in films is difficult. It actually takes a shipwreck in Kieslowski's hauntingly romantic Red to achieve the coupling. So imagine how more frustrating it is for twin kindred souls who happen to live in different dimensions. One lover could be a ghost, like in, well, Ghost (or, better, Mankiewicz's The Ghost and Mrs. Muir) or might even live in a very different time. The 1980 film Somewhere in Time found Christopher Reeve searching in the past for his beloved, Jane Seymour, whom he originally met in his own later day when she was an elderly woman. Obviously, time needn't stand in the way of true love.

The Lake House also keeps two would-be lovers apart through time, but only by two years. They stumble upon each other via a magical mailbox at the eponymous lake house where they have both lived at separate times. The house itself is a cross between Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater and Philip Johnson's New Canaan glass house, a sleek wood and glass cottage built by the famous architect Simon Wyler (Christopher Plummer). It has served as sanctuary for both his prodigal son Alex (Keanu Reeves) and for Dr. Kate Forster (Sandra Bullock).

After packing up to leave the lake house, Kate leaves a letter for the next tenant, who happens to be Alex, though Alex lives in 2004 and Kate has datelined her letter 2006. A correspondence ensues, where each believes the other to be slightly mad until it becomes apparent (due to the immediate service offered by the magic mailbox) that the two are truly inhabiting different years.

Along with the an invisible mailman, Alex and Kate discover that they also share a dog, an intuitive stray that is too frequently summoned to drag the story forward. Because of the time difference, Kate can't quite meet up with Alex, though he does an admirable job of tracking her down on his side of the time continuum. And this is where it's really hard to suspend disbelief in this confection. Has Dr. Foster no access to Google? What, exactly, keeps her from hunting up Alex in her time zone?

For Kate to go searching would, however, spoil what passes as the plot, although director Alejandro and screenwriter David Auburn (Proof) do a good job of that on their own, as they have far too early tipped us off as to why Kate wouldn't find Alex in 2006. Because of this, The Lake House becomes a genuine race against time. Can past events be altered? That's hardly the most interesting point, though. The primary query is, "Why hasn't Kate figured it all out?" or "Why doesn't she start cramming the magic mailbox with past lottery numbers and stock reports for Alex?"

Bullock and Reeves are pleasant enough in this matinee weeper, though both stars fared better in Speed. For those wanting to soil and shred a few Kleenex, the pair spare no grimace of longing, backed, as they are, by Nick Drake's "Time Has Told Me" and Carole King's "It's Too Late" (what, no Cyndi Lauper?). They do their level-best with the script, as does the curmudgeonly Plummer and Dylan Walsh as Kate's not-quite-Keanu boyfriend, Morgan.