Film Of The Week

Most of us have at one time or another wished to stay younger longer and sip from that mythical fountain of youth. The Age of Adaline is a stylish, almost old-fashioned romantic film that turns that notion on its head. What if you couldn’t get older but stayed the same age decade after decade after decade? What if you saw people you love grow old and die, leaving you alone? Not much fun when you think about it.

That’s the dilemma facing Adaline Bowman, played by Gossip Girl’s Blake Lively in her first feature film lead role (she played opposite her now-husband Ryan Reynolds in The Green Lantern). Adaline is born in the early 1900s, marries and becomes a mother, then after a strange car accident, she stops ageing. 

We see parts of Adaline’s life in flashbacks and meet up with her in the present day when she has taken on one of many aliases, a woman called Jenny who works at a library. Jenny keeps to herself and has a classical, timeless quality to the way she dresses and talks. Occasionally she meets up with her daughter, who’s now in her 80s (played by Ellen Burstyn), and who whisperingly calls her ‘Mom’ in public. All the while, Jenny keeps her emotional distance from everyone else.

Then the inevitable happens. One night Jenny locks eyes with a handsome dude called Ellis (Game of Thrones star, Michael Huisman), and love is in the air. But how can Jenny allow herself to love and be loved when she knows she can’t grow old with Ellis and share a normal life with him? Will she run off as she has done so many times before in the past 80 years, or might this time be different? Things then become really complicated when Ellis takes Jenny to meet his parents, played by Harrison Ford and Kathy Baker.

The Age of Adaline should please those who like movies based on Nicholas Sparks books but it’s a few notches above them. Even though it seems like it must’ve been based on a book itself, it’s from an original screenplay by J. Mills Goodloe (who adapted Sparks’s book, Best of Me – but we won’t hold that against him) and Salvador Paskowitz. Lee Toland Krieger (The Vicious Kind, Celeste & Jesse Forever) directs the handsome film with a poetic lyricism and fitting timelessness.

By Vicki Englund