The Age of Adaline Charms and Surprises, Thanks in Part to Harrison Ford

The Age of Adaline is a curious creation. Both earnest romantic melodrama and science-fiction thought experiment, it’s an elegant hodgepodge of tones and tropes, sometimes heavy-handed, sometimes silly, but always admirably sure of purpose. It feels rather novel that the film, directed by Lee Toland Krieger, is, well, not based on a novel, but is instead an original story dreamed up by screenwriters J. Mills Goodloe and Salvador Paskowitz. (Goodloe co-wrote the screenplay for last year’s Nicholas Sparks sapfest The Best of Me, while Paskowitz’s only other writing credit is on something called Nic & Tristan Go Mega Dega.) They seem to have been inspired by films like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Meet Joe Black, glossy, melancholy epic weepies about time and mortality.

Both of those films starred Brad Pitt, so it’s fitting in a way that Blake Lively is the lead in The Age of Adaline. Who but her could match the sexy-sad blond ultra-beauty of Pitt in his heyday? Lively is truly stunning in Adaline, and the movie knows it, giving her plenty of longing close-ups and dressing her in a parade of showstopping outfits. The production first cast Katherine Heigl in the role way back in 2010, but problems arose and she moved on. The role was then offered to Natalie Portman, who turned it down, and then finally went to Lively. She’s an interesting choice: an obvious beauty, but certainly not well tested as the lead of a movie.

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She acquits herself pretty well. She’s not always the most convincing 107-year-old woman, in voice and bearing, but there’s certainly something entrancing happening. In early scenes she seems swallowed up by the responsibility of carrying a decades-spanning, magical-realist film, of playing a woman who’s lived that many lives. She’s a bit stiff, too presentational. But gradually something shifts. Either we are lulled by the film’s gentle grace and endearing, unwieldy ambition, and thus learn to forgive Lively’s stiltedness, or she gets better, her performance flowing more naturally as Adaline’s character is given more shape. I suspect it’s somewhere in the middle. Whatever is happening, Lively grows on you—I came to appreciate all her practiced poise.

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You may have noticed that I said that Lively’s character is 107 years old. It’s true. Adaline Bowman is, you see, cursed or blessed with a unique affliction: at 29 she was in an accident involving a car, some cold water, and a lightning bolt that stopped her aging process. (Oh, to never be 30! Sigh, to be forever 29.) This is all explained, sort of, in the most confusing stretch of the film’s frequent, jarringly pseudoscientific voice-over (provided by the grave, clinical Hugh Ross, who also narrated The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford). But it’s not worth going through all that mumbojumbo. The point is that Adaline is essentially ageless, inside and out, and so she wanders through the years, changing her identity and moving when need be, reading books and visiting her normally aging daughter (played by Ellen Burstyn in the present) when she can. It’s a lonely life, but Adaline seems, in most ways, wistfully content with it.

But of course there is, as there usually is in movies this soft and shimmery, the ever-intruding matter of love. Adaline has had some romance in her life, but she knows that she can’t stay with a man for the long term, never aging while he makes the natural progression toward death. In the past she tended to run out on her men with no explanation, but she is tired of breaking hearts in her old age, so she has all but shut down that part of herself. Or has tried to, anyway. After a very strangely written meet-cute (meet-strange?) in an elevator at a swanky, New Year’s Eve 2014 party, Adaline begins to fall for a scruffy sort named Ellis (Michiel Huisman), despite her better judgment. (You’d think that, at 107, she’d be better about listening to her better judgment. But if she was, I suppose we wouldn’t have a movie.) There’s also Harrison Ford, entering the picture late in the movie as an old love of Adaline’s who suddenly returns to her orbit. The film takes occasional, brief jaunts into the past, but mostly The Age of Adaline is a present-day love story, mixed, of course, with this interesting consideration of a how an ageless person might, in theory, move through the world.

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