thoughts on The Age of Adaline

At age twenty-nine, a young widow named Adaline Bowman (Blake Lively) was in a car accident that changed her life forever.  During a freak California snowstorm, she veered off the road into a river.  She was nearly dead when lightning struck her car; a narrator tells us that the effects of the lightning strike were threefold: it defibrillated her heart; it jolted her awake; and it froze her cells in a process that supposedly won't be named/discovered/explained until 2035, effectively stopping the aging process.  When she is in her early forties, people begin to notice that she is not aging; acquaintances and the police become suspicious, and the FBI wants to bring her in for questioning.  Instead, she runs away and changes her identity, moving once a decade to avoid arousing suspicion, doing her best to avoid forming ties with anyone other than her daughter (played as an adult for the bulk of the movie by Ellen Burstyn).  In the year 2014, at age 106, she meets Ellis Jones (Michiel Huisman), a man who might just make her want to stop running.


One might imagine a lot of things they might do if they discovered that they were going to be young and feel great forever.  There are some limits that one might not initially think of, however, and Adaline imposes more limits on herself by choosing to keep her condition a secret and to repeatedly change identities.  You might say, for example, that you would want to travel and see the world, and Adaline does a little of that...but since she's changing her identity once a decade, she can't really save up money for that long, or acquire debt without becoming a legit criminal when she changes identities.    You might try to test the limits of your mortality, what your body could do, and what you could get away with, and it seems that maybe Adaline has done that, too, given that she drives like a maniac...but you'd have to live with the consequences of anything you did FOREVER, meaning that you wouldn't want to do anything that caused non-fatal but permanent damage to your body, or do anything that would land you in jail.  You might be happy that you have all the time in the world to accomplish your goals...but remember that you only have a decade in any one place, and that you're trying to avoid drawing attention to yourself.  Add to that the fact that Adaline is generally kind, and careful with other people's hearts.  She winds up living a pretty small little existence; she's witnessed over a century worth of history but doesn't have a history of her own, or not one that she can tell anyone about, anyway.  It would be sad, to not be able to keep in touch with people or keep pictures or have goals or tell your own stories.


The film is interesting and entertaining.  However, given its premise and a few directorial choices, it is also sometimes silly.  The narrator adds a degree of whimsy to the proceedings, which doesn't really fit given that the film mostly takes itself seriously.  Prior to Adaline's accident, the narrator tells us very seriously that something "almost magical" happened that night: it started to snow in northern California!  "Adaline did not know how to drive in the snow!," I thought to myself dramatically, anticipating the accident that was about to occur.  The narration tries to provide transitions between the different parts of Adaline's life; while transitions are perhaps necessary, one wonders if there might have been a less clunky way of providing them. 


The film also takes a somewhat odd turn when Adaline meets Ellis's parents and is immediately recognized by Ellis's father, William (Harrison Ford), with whom she had a brief but intense love affair decades before.  William recognizes her so easily; is so quick to doubt Adaline's explanation that William must have known her mother, not her (Adaline is now calling herself Jenny); gets Adaline to tell him the truth with so little trouble; and accepts the truth so readily that one wonders why she didn't just tell him when they initially knew each other: he obviously would have believed her.  Further, as a would-be doctor turned astronomer, he had the intelligence, resources, and contacts to try to help her understand her condition.  It would be one thing if they had added in a detail that she had tried to tell lovers the truth in the past, but they had either thought her crazy or believed her but freaked out about the age difference; we are given no reason to believe that any such thing has happened.  The secrecy seems unnecessary, then, and seems to have cost her literally decades worth of happiness.


I generally enjoyed the film.  The performances were good; the costumes and sets were beautiful.  You have to get past the fake science and some silliness and just roll with the story if you're going to see it, though.