One deus ex machina contrivance, at the beginning of a fantasy movie, is acceptable. It gets the wheels of imagination rolling. But a second one, less than two hours later? That’s sheer dramaturgical laziness, and the crutch of your genre can only protect you for so long.
But that’s what you have to accept in The Age of Adaline. This is a movie so proudly, self-consciously absurd that it begs you to throw tomatoes at the screen during its shameless third-act twist. Or perhaps another vegetable would be more appropriate, because the film is cornier than the drought-stricken farmland of Interstellar.
The movie’s title is a pun, because Adaline (Gossip Girl’s Blake Lively) is ageless, thanks to a condition explained in a brief backstory montage. Born in 1908 and raised as a Jazz Age socialite in San Francisco, she lost her husband in a Golden Gate bridge construction accident and birthed one child before she herself “died” in a car wreck — that is, until a fluke bolt of lightning struck her automobile and somehow prevented her telomeres from shrinking, thus granting her eternal life. Ah, to be a twentysomething forever.
Turns out her gift isn’t much fun. As the years go by, the age on Adaline’s driver’s license appears to be curiously older than the woman behind the wheel of the car. Adaline and her daughter, Flemming, begin to look like sisters. The FBI would like to know more.
To avoid becoming, at best, a tabloid curiosity, Adaline withdraws from public life, changing her hairstyle, identity and place of residence every 10 years while avoiding intimacy with men, lest she reveal her secret to anyone. Which brings us to New Year’s Eve 2014, the night before her 108th birthday, on the cusp of another move, a life soon to be disrupted by Ellis (Michiel Huisman), a charmingly rakish, funny and irresistible suitor with a bohemian loft, a working knowledge of Romantic poets, a culinary wit and an idle fortune, after he cashed out his tech startup for millions. If there ever was a male lead conjured by a focus group of romance writers, it’s this guy.
Their courtship is sickeningly cute but sputtering, because Adaline is torn between seeing the relationship through and retreating into comforting isolation. The more The Age of Adaline progresses, the more you realize it’s a supernatural spin on a shopworn personal-journey narrative: The emotionally unavailable heroine needs to overcome fears and anxieties to finally attain happiness.
It’s an idea so familiar that it wastes the verdant sociopolitical premise of its fantasy conceit. There’s something to be said for a movie that explores our national, doubled-edged desire to preserve youth at all costs, but The Age of Adaline is too winsome and twee to go there. Instead, the plentiful on-the-nose wordplay in J. Mills Goodloe and Salvador Paskowitz’s screenplay will have to suffice: “You haven’t changed a bit!,” “She thinks she has nine lives,” “She’s an old soul,” etc. As one character spells it out, in a summation that seems destined to be the movie’s tagline, “All these years you’ve lived, but you’ve never had a life.”
At least director Lee Toland Krieger has a sense of humor, as evidenced by the borderline stunt casting of the film’s supporting players. As the present-day Flemming, Ellen Burstyn gets to play an octogenarian daughter to an actor half her off-screen age for the second time in two years (she was “Old Murph” in the aforementioned Interstellar). And Harrison Ford, looking as ancient as Stonehenge but still hip in a hilarious beatnik goatee, plays Ellis’ father, a man with a secret important enough to justify the casting of Harrison Ford.
The Age of Adaline is a universe a way from being a smart movie, but in its ridiculous way, it’s refreshing, because it’s not trying to be something it isn’t. Russell Crowe’s turgid and placating The Water Diviner, which opens the same day, ineptly attempts to offer something for everyone, whereas The Age of Adaline unabashedly seeks the Harlequin vote alone, and will surely win it.
THE AGE OF ADALINE. Director: Lee Toland Krieger; Cast: Blake Lively, Michiel Huisman, Harrison Ford, Ellen Burstyn, Kathy Baker; Distributor: Lionsgate; Rating: PG-13; Opens: Friday at most area theaters