Director: Lee Toland Krieger Starring: Blake Lively, Harrison Ford, Michiel Huisman Writers: J. Mills Goodloe, Salvador Paskowitz | 3/5 The Age of Adaline Director Lee Krieger’s last film, 2012’s Celeste and Jesse Forever, was a hilarious and insightful breakdown of relationships. His latest, The Age of Adaline, trades in the complexity for a pretty, Benjamin Button-esque color palette, a swath of gorgeous actors wearing great period clothes, and a boilerplate fairtytale romance that will surely make most young girls in the audience swoon. Adaline has plenty of faults, but it is not without its upsides. One of those upsides involves a dashing seventy-two year old actor named Harrison Ford. More on that in a bit. Adaline takes an overtly complex road to tell a fairly straightforward story of love and the lengths some go to run from it. The title character, played straight by ex-Gossip Girl Blake Lively, was born in 1902 and aged normally until the age of twenty-nine, when she was involved in an automobile accident that killed her and then brought her back to life. The narration goes to great lengths to convince and explain to us how exactly, scientifically speaking, this could happen. Barely into the movie, some golden-toned voice is going on about anoxic states, nucleic acids, jigga-watts, meteors hitting the moon, and Argentine coastal tide levels. It is almost like listening to Doc Brown explain his Flux Capacitor in Back to the Future, except we don’t get the pleasure of seeing Christopher Lloyd’s crazy hair. Anyways, somehow all of these crazy scientific words are the ingredients to everlasting life - take that Holy Grail! The narration is grating at worst, distracting at best. It is fraught with lines like “a young engineer displayed uncommon gallantry” and “something unusual happened. Something almost…….magical.” It is by far the film’s greatest weakness, knocking it down a good half star. As far as screenwriting goes, it is simply unnecessary. It’s fiction; just tell us she can live forever and move on. |
Anyways, Adaline must change her identity every decade to escape those pesky Feds. She watches her friends and daughter (Ellen Burstyn, the go-to gal for these slightly-sci-fi mother/daughter roles) age and wither as she stays the same. She refuses to let herself fall in love, because at the end of the decade she will just have to pack up and move again - and there’s the immortal thing. All of this is exposition that we get fairly early in the film. The real backbone of the story arrises when Adaline begins to be pursued by an extremely pushy - but also dashingly handsome, so it’s OK - man named Ellis (Michiel Huisman of Game of Thrones). Could this be the one? Is he worth giving up eternity for? You know the answer to both questions before the movie even begins.
The love affair between Adaline and Ellis is not the reason you should be tuning in. For the first two acts, the film’s pulse is basically flatlined, getting by on those aforementioned period costumes and the alluring tea-stained cinematography. It is not until the third act that Age of Adaline gets its first jolt of life, heart, and emotion. You will know when it’s about to get real when Ellis’ dad William (Ford) is introduced. You can pull from the trailers that Ford’s character is a ghost from Adeline’s ageless past, but in no way does it hint at the emotional fireworks that light up the last forty minutes.
All of the performances are good, though Lively is a bit monotone, but nobody gets close to Ford. You can literally see a lifetimes worth of love, longing, and hurt run across his face from the first time his aged eyes witness his son’s new girlfriend. In a career filled with memorable, classic performances, Ford has rarely been given the opportunity to flex these kind of dramatic muscles. For this reason alone, Adaline is worth your time. Emotion looks good on you, Indy!
The love affair between Adaline and Ellis is not the reason you should be tuning in. For the first two acts, the film’s pulse is basically flatlined, getting by on those aforementioned period costumes and the alluring tea-stained cinematography. It is not until the third act that Age of Adaline gets its first jolt of life, heart, and emotion. You will know when it’s about to get real when Ellis’ dad William (Ford) is introduced. You can pull from the trailers that Ford’s character is a ghost from Adeline’s ageless past, but in no way does it hint at the emotional fireworks that light up the last forty minutes.
All of the performances are good, though Lively is a bit monotone, but nobody gets close to Ford. You can literally see a lifetimes worth of love, longing, and hurt run across his face from the first time his aged eyes witness his son’s new girlfriend. In a career filled with memorable, classic performances, Ford has rarely been given the opportunity to flex these kind of dramatic muscles. For this reason alone, Adaline is worth your time. Emotion looks good on you, Indy!