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The best way to describe The Lake House is via Venn diagram:

1. Draw two equal-sized circles next to each other so they intersect slightly on their sides.

2. Label the left circle "Boy, 2004." Label the right circle "Girl, 2006." Label the small intersection in the middle "Mailbox."

3. Now draw a giant circle around everything you just drew and label that "Stupid."

Take your diagram to the movie and feel free to tape it to your armrest for quick reference.

The Lake House is an unlikely romance film with an unlikely premise. Strip away all the excess -- 50 minutes of fluff, unnecessary sub-plots, extended time lapses -- and you have what could have been a terrific short film about a man and woman separated by two years and linked by the mailbox in front of a house they shared on different timelines. How and why The Lake House became so cluttered in its writing is difficult to say, but it would have benefited greatly from a sense of urgency. After all, love stories, even ones that occur in different time periods, shouldn't be so laborious.

Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock, both passengers of Speed, reunite under the same roof amid bizarre circumstances -- yes, more bizarre than a bomb-rigged bus stuck at 55 mph in Los Angeles rush hour. As Kate Forster (Bullock) is moving out of her house, she leaves a note for the new tenant. The next day the new tenant, Alex Wyler (Reeves), gets the note and responds back. They turn into pen pals, writing back and forth using the mailbox they both share at a lake house that's perched over the water on dozens of stilts. How they share the house without knowing they share it, and how the letters arrive two years in the past and two years in the future, can be diagnosed using any of Einstein's theories of relativity (special or otherwise), or the Just Because Rule of Hollywood, which states that the mailbox alters time just because.

Much of early portions of The Lake House are cute and fun, the kind of sequences that propel romantic films forward with their tiny cute-guzzling engines. The couple's first letters are sent in rapid succession, as they stand at the mailbox. Alex's dog seems rather perplexed to see the flag go up and down by itself. Sometime after the initial meeting, though, the tone gets darker and more serious. Alex resents his dad (Christopher Plummer), and his brother is a bit needy. Kate has a boyfriend who does all the typical bad boyfriend things -- mainly telling her to turn the TV down while he's working.

But it has more cute moments, too: Alex plants a tree in the past, which then grows two full years in an instant for Kate; Kate sends a sentimental book unpublished in 2004 to Alex; and then he plants little surprises into the framework of an apartment complex he knows Kate will occupy in two years. These scenes are what they are -- sappy romance -- and that doesn't harm Lake House. What harms it is its meandering pace, which is too slow for a film with two big stars who happen to have chemistry. And keeping the time periods straight is difficult, but I seriously doubt audiences will care that much about the details to devote the time to sort them out.

One of the more curious aspects is the house used to name the film. It is a house of glass, perched over a freezing lake with no discernable heaters on the roof. It gives new meaning to the Frank Lloyd Wright quote: "Give me the luxuries of life and I will gladly do without the necessities." The movie would have been more aptly named after the mailbox, instead of a house that seems to defy gravity to provide a backdrop for a romance.

And speaking of the mailbox, did it work on holidays? What about Sundays? And why didn't the postal carriers from both time periods ever accidentally pick up the notes?

Oh, I know the answer ... just because.