THE AGE OF ADALINE
DIRECTOR: Lee Toland Krieger
CAST: Blake Lively, Harrison Ford, Michiel Huisman, Ellen Burstyn, Kathy Baker,
CLASSIFICATION: 7-9 PG
RUNNING TIME: 112 minutes
RATING: ***
After swanning through six seasons of Gossip Girl as teen queen Serena van der Woodsen, Blake Lively (pictured) made some smart choices. Aside from the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants movies and Green Lantern, she’s kept her head down, delivering credible supporting turns for directors Rebecca Miller (The Private Lives of Pippa Lee), Ben Affleck (The Town) and Oliver Stone (Savages).
Lively has long been ripe for a lead role that allows her to stretch and surprise. The Age of Adaline, about a woman whose physical appearance stops changing just before she hits 30, doesn’t quite give her all that, but it’s a step in the right direction.
An elegantly confected cream puff of a melodrama, The Age of Adaline plays like an exercise in handling a preposterous story, booby-trapped for maximal ridiculousness, with tasteful conviction. The film is pleasant, respectable and a bit dull, reining in the silliness of its material and taking few risks.
Handsomely mounted and shot and edited with confidence and fluidity, if not much imagination, the movie starts on a note of noirish mystery as a solitary Lively walks the San Francisco streets. Via voiceover (by Hugh Ross) and a few sepia-toned flashbacks, we learn that by some stroke of hocus-pocus, Adaline stopped ageing the moment she was in a near-fatal car accident nearly 80 years ago. In other words, she’s a 107-year-old with a 29-year-old’s face and body.
That might sound like a dream scenario for many in the movie business, but Adaline, wary of being treated like a freak, keeps her condition a secret. Changing her name and residence every 10 years, our heroine becomes adept at avoiding intimacy – and hits the road each time someone gets too close, not wanting to commit and then watch her beloved grow old and die. When we meet her, she’s working as a librarian, maintaining regular contact only with a blind pianist friend (Lynda Boyd) and the now-elderly daughter she left many years ago (Burstyn). In a handful of scenes that easily could have veered into camp, Burstyn and Lively convey the strange, tender dynamic between two women whose physical appearances belie their actual relationship.
Life appears to be coasting along for Adaline until she meets Ellis (<&bh”http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/game-thrones-season-5-tv-787298”>Huisman), a charmer with lots of money and a convenient penchant for all things old. Ellis falls hard for Adaline, who gradually gives in to his courtship, and just when The Age of Adaline starts slipping into corny-romance platitudes, the plot twists in a welcome way: Ellis takes Adaline to meet his parents (Kathy Baker and Harrison Ford) and let’s just say it’s not the first time Ellis’s dad has laid eyes on Adaline.
Lively persuasively pulls off the aural and visual incongruity of being an old soul in a young body. The performance is all the more impressive for not coming off as overly studied; Lively has a refreshingly naturalistic acting style, and she brings a quiet, unshowy gravity to the role. The fact that she’s not an especially vivid performer actually makes her ideal for Adaline, a woman who closes herself off to the world with a demure smile.
The film itself is, for long stretches, nearly as graceful and sympathetic as its leading lady. Krieger keeps the bombast and heartstring-yanking to a minimum – even Rob Simonsen’s score is relatively restrained – and weaves some fine narrative and visual details into the story, such as the photo album Adaline keeps of her dog, one of her few long-term emotional touchstones, or the fleeting shot of Ellis’ foot seeking out Adaline’s in bed the morning after their first night together. But if anything, The Age of Adaline is too polite, too cautious. It never lunges into four-hankie territory, nor does it melt into Nicholas Sparks-like goo or boil over into full-on Sirkian melodrama. For all its competence and polish, the movie feels a bit bland and one wonders if the story might have been better told with Almodovarian excess, or as a lean, atmospheric thriller.
The filmmakers don’t pull us inside Adaline’s head space or play meaningfully with their premise, never, for example, hinting at the character’s response, as a woman at once old and young, to the shifting social, political and cultural landscapes of the country she lives in. Instead, they stick to the wan romantic storyline, reducing Adaline’s presumably terrifying, enlightening experience to a predictable choice between following her head or her heart.
The Age of Adaline does prove that Krieger can work on a big canvas, and that Lively can hold the centre of a movie with her stillness. Promising signs.
The Hollywood Reporter