Nothing in film revives ‘ Adaline’
A promising idea is at the heart of “The Age of Adaline,” but no one connected with the movie seems willing to explore it: What would happen if a woman stopped aging — if she were over 100 years old but didn’t look a day over 30?
Blake Lively plays a woman, born in 1908, who drives off a bridge into freezing water and dies some time in the late 1930s. How wonderful it might have been had the movie stopped there — but no, she is struck by lightning and revives, and from then on, she can’t age a day.
Funny how sometimes a movie’s quality will reveal itself early on, in little things. In one of the first scenes, Adaline ( Lively) knocks on someone’s door. A young man looks at her and registers surprise, then lets her in. Seconds later, we find out that he has met her before and is expecting her visit, so why the meaningful look? No reason.
Lively goes through the film talking to the other actors with a kind of wistful distance. At first, this seems an indication of Adaline’s sad and deep understanding, but it’s onenote, and as the movie soon reveals, Adaline doesn’t have much wisdom. Lively, the screenwriters and director Lee Toland Krieger seem to have one idea about the character: that Adaline’s inability to age has caused her to live a kind of fugitive life, in which she has been afraid to form attachments.
Do you see what a dodge that is? By keeping her remote from others, the filmmakers avoid having to imagine Adaline’s possible development. They avoid having to do anything beyond the initial idea. They can just move her from 1937 to 2015 in a sad but stunted emotional state, just floating along thinking, “Woe is me — I have to live forever and don’t even have to drink blood.”
The little thinking that we actually do find in “The Age of Adaline” makes no emotional sense. We are told that Adaline changes identities every decade or so. Why? A 29- year- old could be 25 or 40. And if Adaline really wanted to pass for 45, she could stop leaving the house dressed to the nines and made up as though for a photo shoot. In fact, with a few peroxide streaks, she could stretch things out to 50. There’s no reason to go through life detached from every human contact but for one blind friend, who thinks Adaline is in her 50s.
Lively tries, but she is not enough of an actress to animate such a thinly written role. She is unable — and clearly wasn’t encouraged — to fight her way to any real emotional stakes by the power of her own imagination. From start to finish, she plays a mood. Ellen Burstyn plays Adaline’s daughter, and in their two- person scenes, the contrast is stark. When the camera cuts to Burstyn, everything is alive and invested. When the camera cuts to Lively, there’s nothing there.
Employing the crutch of some awkward, hamfisted narration, the film tells the story of Adaline finally finding love, but the relationship she forges doesn’t seem like much. He’s a San Francisco Internet billionaire — a generation ago, the romantic profession for a man was “architect” — but he acts like such a dork around her that it’s hard to imagine that this attraction is anything unique in her experience.
The movie wakes up only when he brings her home to her parents, and the father turns out to be a man she loved 49 years earlier. The lost love is played by Harrison Ford, and he almost single- handedly lifts the movie to the level of tolerable. Also worthy of note is Anthony Ingruber, who plays the same character in the flashback scenes, imitating Ford shamelessly, from the voice to the swagger to the sneering, wise- guy smile. Ford and his young imitator help, but the movie is already dead when they show up, and reanimating bolts of lightning only strike in the movies.
Too bad. “The Age of Adaline” might have raised some interesting questions. For example, who knows more about life, the 80- year- old, who has experienced life in all of its various phases, or the 107- yearold, who has seen the panorama of life from the privileged position of youth and health? And would a physical 29- year- old who is really 107 prefer the music from the 1920s, or keep up with the times?
Someone should steal this concept and make a decent movie out of it.