Eternal life and eternal youth are two things the world, but particularly America, are infatuated with. People swallow handfuls of vitamins, eat the greenest of foods, and do a tremendous amount of exercise in order to stay in top physical condition to live a longer life. Medical advancements are such that lifespans have grown by decades. In terms of youth, people lather their faces with creams and lotions or just surgically alter their faces in order to look like they are still in “the prime of their life.” Of course, these things end up being frivolous. Everyone ends up the same way. Dead. What if someone did have eternal life and was eternally young though? How would this person be able to justify it to anyone, form relationships with people, or just not be seen as a freak?
The Age of Adaline looks to wrestle with these potentially very interesting questions. Unfortunately, the movie spends far more time on a schmaltzy romance that never connects than exploring these issues. Blake Lively as the titular Adaline tries her best to imbue these moments with the psychological weight of being immortal, but the lackluster script really lets her down and only allows for that introspection to be reserved for very short snippets.
In a very clunky, exposition heavy opening, we learn the entire back-story of Adaline. She was born in 1908. She got married, had a kid, and the husband died a couple of years later. She gets in a car accident, is struck by lightning, and is turned into an immortal. They go to great lengths to scientifically explain in voiceover how this phenomenon could occur, and it is a total waste of time. It’s as if the filmmakers did not trust the audience to have any kind of suspension of disbelief. This narration hand holds us through a lot of the movie, and it never justifies its existence once.
At a present day New Year’s Eve party, Adaline (using the alias Jenny) meets Ellis (Michiel Huisman), who came into a big fortune at a young age and is an overly persistent courter. Because this is a movie, she finds his borderline stalker behavior charming and falls for him. Their romance is what drives the majority of the movie, and that is a problem. This is mainly because Lively and Huisman feel like they are in two different movies. Lively is in a low-key, quiet drama, and Huisman is in a talky, cheesy romance movie. The two have no chemistry, and the movie Lively is in is far more interesting.
It’s a shame this central relationship doesn’t work because the other elements of Adaline’s life are actually interesting. She has a daughter (Ellen Burstyn), and the two have to keep their actual familial relationship a secret. Her only actual friend is blind and can’t see how she doesn’t age. And, most notably, she’s confronted with one of her previous loves (Harrison Ford), who just so happens to be Ellis’ father. Yes, it’s a huge coincidence, but the heartbreak between the two is genuine. Ford, unlike Huisman, is dialed in on the same tone Lively is going for, and their scenes together are really good. This is the first time in a long time Harrison Ford isn’t falling asleep on screen, and it’s a nice reminder he can actually act.
I wish we had gotten more of Adaline’s past. We see flashes of her in various decades, and instead of exploring, all we get is to see how beautiful Blake Lively is in various period dresses. But, I mean, there is not a second of this movie where you don’t think she is the most gorgeous woman you’ve ever seen. There were ample opportunities to connect her past to what she’s going through in the present, but often the flashbacks are superfluous. One in particular stands out where she talks with an accountant about investing in Xerox when it first gets started. These could have helped satisfy my exploratory want, but alas, the script doesn’t want to go there.
Even with these issues, The Age of Adaline is not a disaster, and that is due almost entirely to Blake Lively, a sentiment I never thought I’d write. You buy her instantly as an old soul in the body of a beautiful, young woman. She has a tremendous sense of how to use her face to convey so many things at once. She doesn’t have the most dynamic voice, but the look in her eyes and the rise and fall of her cheeks say everything necessary. For most of the movie, I wanted to see her in a silent film. I’ve never been impressed with Lively before in the slightest, but this did a lot to turn me around.
The Age of Adaline has a ton of problems. Its central romance has no weight. It never explores its psychological questions nearly as in depth as it should. Sometimes they confuse directly telling you an emotional change instead of earning it. However, the movie has enough good in it to make it almost average. When it does decide to look at the effects immortality has on a person, it really works. Lively, Ford, and Burstyn are all doing very good work here and should be proud of their performances. If the film had dialed back on the romance and ramped up the intellectual curiosity, it could have been a very good film.
