Blake Lively and science fiction film fans despair, Lee Toland Krieger’s newest movie is an unrealistic, tired flop not worth the hungover Saturday afternoon trek. “The Age of Adaline” is steeped in banality and suffers from stagnant character development.
Adaline (Blake Lively, “Savages”) was a normal pre-war housewife living contently in San Francisco, until one night when she took the old jalopy out for a spin in Sonoma County. Snow began to fall, and considering Californians have a hard time driving in beautiful weather, Adaline’s joy ride was destined to go awry. The outcome of the blizzard exceeded expectations when Adaline sent the car over the guardrail, careening down the cliff side into a river.
While she’s drowning among the wreckage, a lightning bolt strikes her, and she magically becomes cursed with the inability to age, which allows her to appear 25 while being 107 years old. Adaline soon realizes that her random condition makes her a person-of-interest to the authorities, and she begins a decades long tradition of changing her name, traversing the globe and stealing the hearts of men.
Adaline’s story may be fluid and original, but the supporting characters are remarkably stale. Adaline’s daughter, Flemming (Ellen Burstyn, “Interstellar”), is solely defined by her love for her mother. The protagonist’s love interest, Ellis (Michiel Huisman, “The Invitation”), is by even the most conservative definitions a stalker. As he walked down the stairs one day, his eye caught Adaline reading a book in braille, which triggered days of relentless phone calls, drop-ins at Adaline’s job and harassment on the street. If “The Age of Adaline” had an iota of reality within its screenplay, she would’ve certainly called the police and filed a restraining order.
But don’t count on this film to justify its plot with reality. Adaline’s accident that caused her to stop aging is horribly narrated by a monotonous voice, spewing pseudo-science in esoteric language in an attempt to give Adaline’s condition a scientific justification. The plot would have gained some semblance of authority if they had just called it what it is: magic. The narration breaks up the flow of the narrative with choppy and unnatural commentary that gives an unnecessary documentary feel.
Even without the narration, the dialogue is exceedingly banal. Lively does the best she can with her sophisticated and antiquated lines, but you can see the stiffness of Adaline’s character makes her uncomfortable at moments. Ellis may as well have been a pull-string doll that doles out tawdry exclamations of romance such like, “I can’t imagine life without you.” Throughout the film there are maybe two lines about his backstory, and the rest of the movie he leaks emotionally unstable dribble onto Adaline that reeks of insincerity.
Every supporting character is given a niche (e.g. Flemming as the cute old daughter of a youthful centenarian) and is then allotted a series of cheap, cliché lines to carry them through the movie.
William (Harrison Ford, “The Expendables 3”), a lover from Adaline’s past and awkwardly the father of Ellis, provides the movie with its only authentic character. When he confronts Adaline about her secret in the final moments of the movie, we see an energy between Ford and Lively that we can only dream of seeing between her and the spurious Michiel Huisman.
The initial storyline for The Age of Adaline had promise, but it crashed and burned as it progressed. Watching 110 minutes of director Krieger failing to pull at viewers’ emotional heartstrings is a visceral form of torture certainly not worth the time and effort to watch.
1/5
