Time-altering romcom’s dotty but endearing
FOR anyone who frets about the ageing process, whose every encounter with a mirror yields a grey hair or wrinkle that wasn’t there last time, I prescribe The Age Of Adaline.
It’s a whimsical romance driven by the absurd idea that as a result of a freak road accident, a San Francisco woman born in 1908 could stop ageing at 29 and pop up in the 21st century aged 107, but looking like the lovely Blake Lively. Which might sound like an enviable state of affairs, but as the story shows, not getting older is no picnic.
Adaline Bowman (Lively) is forced to reinvent herself every ten years, to avoid arousing the interest of geneticists. She feels she can’t commit to longterm relationships, and the little girl she had when, as a young widow she suffered her accident, has now turned into Ellen Burstyn.
Things begin to change when, calling herself Jenny, she meets handsome tycoon Ellis Jones (Game Of Thrones alumnus Michiel Huisman). At first she tries to shrug him off as she has all her other admirers, but he persists, and takes her home to meet his parents. Which is when she finds that she ‘knew’ his father (Harrison Ford) back in the Sixties.
All this stretches credibility well beyond snapping point, and the underlying dottiness of the story is intensified by a solemn voiceover which attempts to explain the phenomenon scientifically.
If you can suppress your giggles during all this polysyllabic nonsense, then hats off. I didn’t.
And yet, somehow or other, Lee Toland Krieger’s picture sort of works. Lively and Huisman have an appealing chemistry, while Burstyn and Ford add some much-needed gravitas.
Moreover, while not exactly a philosophical treatise, the film does, at a deeper level, have something to say about the human impulse to fight the ageing process.
After all, Adaline positively yearns for the grey hair and wrinkles that will confer normality on her.