‘Adaline’ drains the fountain of youth
Adaline Bowman has been 29 and holding for nearly eight decades, and while that might seem like a beautiful blessing — especially if you look like actress Blake Lively — it’s actually a lonely, inexplicable hardship.
It means the San Francisco native, born on Jan. 1, 1908, must cycle through fake identities, frequent moves and separation from a daughter who ages to look like Adaline’s grandmother.
Marriage or even a long-term relationship for Adaline seems to be out of the question in “The Age of Adaline.” But when Adaline meets a persistent suitor, philanthropist Ellis Jones (Michiel Huisman, “Game of Thrones”), she is forced to re-evaluate her pattern of lying, running and keeping men and others at bay.
As a young widowed mother, Adaline was in a car accident that was part of a series of serendipitous cosmic events that somehow froze her age at 29. She can find no scientific explanation for what happened and certainly how, or if, it can be reversed.
Throughout the movie, we see snapshots of other times (not to mention fashions and hairstyles), along with love found and always lost. As one perceptive friend observes, all these years, she’s lived but never had a life. She never had the chance to test what Robert Browning said, “Grow old along with me. The best is yet to be.”
“The Age of Adaline,” directed by Lee Toland Krieger (“Celeste & Jesse Forever”), requires audiences to make the same sort of leap of film faith as with “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” or “The Time Traveler’s Wife” or even “Back to the Future.” You just have to go with it, including a key coincidence, off-screen conversations and adjustments, and a hardto-buy early development about the FBI coming after Adaline and forcing her to flee and try to keep the lowest profile possible.
She works at a library, lives in an apartment with her dog in San Francisco’s Chinatown and shies away from ever having her photo taken. As she jokes to her 82-yearold daughter, played with warmth and spirit by Ellen Burstyn, she never changes so she looks the same today as in 1954.
“The Age of Adaline” is a sweet
romance, anchored by Ms. Lively whose circumspect exterior belies the emotional storms beneath, Mr. Huisman as the tech millionaire almost too good to be true, and Harrison Ford and Kathy Baker as his parents.
The movie takes all too brief advantage of some vintage images of San Francisco — before and after the 1906 earthquake and during construction of the Golden Gate Bridge — and never explores how a woman born a century ago would feel about the social, technological, medical, political, military and other changes she witnessed.
In the end, this is about appreciating what we take for granted and dread: aging and dying. In a business obsessed with youth, real or courtesy of skillful plastic surgeons, it’s a welcome rarity.