Sentenced to immortality without possibility of wrinkles
Maturing Blake Lively gives an outstanding performance
Adaline’s unflappable elegance and old-world etiquette make every one around her seem a little too modern, too laid back.
It’s hard to feel sorry for a woman cursed to be drop-dead beautiful forever. To be timelessly stunning would be one of the better “disabilities” to sustain from a car crash, I would think. But director Lee Toland Krieger’s cosmic riddle, The Age of Adaline, doesn’t pander to pity. Instead, the improbable proposition that Adaline is in a state of suspended animation — remaining 29 years old not because she’s afraid of 30, but due to a stroke of lightning and inexplicable science — is cushioned by a recurring emphasis on the cosmos and its vast secret possibilities. Maybe miracles are just science we haven’t met yet.
Adaline Bowman (a demure Blake Lively) has become weary of her miracle. She’s been on the run since the 1950s, plunking down weak roots a decade at a time, never getting too close to anyone who might notice she hasn’t greyed or wrinkled. Lively’s performance is the only thing about her that has aged. No longer the teenage Serena of Gossip Girl, or fumbling through a Charlestown accent in The Town, Lively comes into her own in the role of the guarded but poised Adaline.
Better still, Adaline’s unflappable elegance and old-world etiquette make everyone around her seem a little too modern, too laid back, altogether lacking in a sense of history.
Another director might try to play this element straight — Lively as an ethereal, untouchable Daisy Buchanan — but Krieger’s film doesn’t take itself too seriously. When rebuffed by Adaline on the streets of San Francisco’s Chinatown, for example, her suitor gives the bouquet of flowers he’s left holding to an old Asian woman passing by — she’s tickled pink. Although there is something of Daisy Buchanan in Adaline’s moneyed glamour (a parallel that echoes in the soundtrack — Lana Del Rey has featured songs in both The Great Gatsby and here), Lively’s character is no beautiful little fool.
Insipid jokes about women not being able to drive or the assumption that Adaline couldn’t possibly know the batting history of the Giants, are felled by her steely gaze and quick tongue. Take that, Fitzgerald.
Krieger’s other films, The Vicious Kind and Celeste & Jesse Forever, are less glossy than this feature, but share a similar interest in the riskiness of intimacy.
When Adaline does find love, it is with a man who breaches the gap between old and new worlds. After a few missteps Ellis Jones (Michiel Huisman), comes to understand Adaline’s archive fever and brings her “flowers” in the form of Henry James’ Daisy Miller and Janet Fitch’s White Oleander.
Ellis’ father proves to be another footnote to Adaline’s past — Harrison Ford plays a cartoonish dad, mumbling trivia while wearing Coke-bottle glasses. But much like her suitors who try to stand a bit taller and straighten their collars when around her, Ford’s character sheds the elements of caricature in the presence of Adaline and delivers an electric scene of re-encounter.
The perfect symmetry of the film’s storyline may be too tidy, too perfect for some. Fair enough.
But Adaline’s secret is a dramatization of the vulnerability we all resist, and so her love story isn’t so much cosmic in its significance, as it is miraculous in its familiarity.