Can a woman, gifted with the miracle of immortality and eternal
youth, ever truly find love with a mortal? That may sound like the
Arwen/Aragorn storyline from The
Lord of the Rings but it's
also the central question at the heart of The
Age of Adaline, an elegant but ultimately passionless star vehicle for the
stunning Blake Lively, playing a woman who will never need to waste her money
on Oil of Olay.
"It's the little details that will
trip you up", Adaline Bowman tells a young forger as he crafts her a fake
ID. Ironically, it's the little details about The
Age of Adaline that don't
completely add up, and it's a shame because Lively has never been this good in
all of her career. Adaline is a woman who, just shy of her 30th birthday, was
in a completely freakish car accident that caused her to stop aging. It's like
something out of a Marvel Comic, really, and the constantly intrusive, highly
technical narrator goes to painstaking detail to make sure we understand every bit
of what happened to her. Any sense of mystery or magic destroyed by a hail of
boring voice-over, we are taken through Adaline's life of hiding in plain
sight.
Like television vampires Adaline moves
around from place to place, staying just long enough that people won't get
suspicious. For decades she goes on like this, switching identities and mostly
steering clear of personal relationships. After a close encounter with the
government, Adaline goes deeper into hiding, only keeping in touch with her daughter
(Ellen Burstyn), who unfortunately did not gain any of mommy's powers. But poor
Adaline has given up on the idea of love, fearing it would be too dangerous and
too painful to lose someone she loves.
There's a grand, decades-spanning fairy
tale waiting to be told, and the film certainly looks gorgeous, all elegant
colors and soft tones adding to the dramatic sweep. But the story itself is
hardly epic and certainly isn't romantic, which makes us focus on how ludicrous
the whole thing is. Adaline is swept off her feet by Ellis (Michael Huisman), a
random guy whose most notable attributes are his beard and his stalker-ish
personality. Not only do we wonder why she'd be interested in this guy beyond a
casual fling, but she's no great catch either thanks to a screenplay that
struggles to define who Adaline is. Born in 1908, she's the very definition of
an "old soul". Her old-fashioned demeanor gives her a certain
gracefulness, but her aloofness keeps us from forming an interest in Adaline
beyond her gifts. It's strange nobody has figured out her secret since her face
is plastered everywhere, particularly in old photographs of the era. When she
encounters these, they trigger flashbacks that clue us into her past but don't
necessarily inform her present. It says something that the greatest emotional
tumult in Adaline's life is when her beloved dog gets ill.
With a couple of Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants movies to her credit, crime
thriller The Town, plus
the disastrous Green Lantern and Oliver Stone's Savages, Lively is probably
still best recognized from Gossip
Girl. 'Adaline' could go a long way in changing that as she's clearly the
best thing about it. She's mysterious and speaks with a careful cadence fitting
of Adaline's age, but her demeanor lightens when in the company of those who
know her secret, as if freed from the emotional burden. Lively is particularly
good when paired up with Harrison Ford, who plays Ellis' father and one of
Adaline's past loves. For a brief time we see the potential of what this film
could have been; a deeply personal love story about old lovers who must deal
with what might have been and what never will be because of a twist of magical
fate.
The Age of Adaline is directed by Lee Told Krieger, who turned a small relationship
comedy Celeste and Jesse
Forever into an affecting,
and at times profound love story. Krieger doesn't have the benefit of Rashida
Jones and Andy Samberg to work with this time, though, but more importantly
he's saddled with a screenplay that makes Adaline's immortal life seem very
shallow.
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
