nothin “Age of Adaline” Doesn’t Quite Mature | New Haven Independent

Age of Adaline” Doesn’t Quite Mature

Diyah Pera

Michiel Huisman and Blake Lively

I can just imagine the confidential conversation between Harrison Ford and Kathy Baker — co-supporting actors in the Age of Adaline — and their agents:

Is this all you’ve got for us?”

It’s hard to find roles for older actors. But don’t you see this project’s perfect? This film’s about a woman who stops aging.”

Yeah, but for Chrissakes we’re her parents!”

The film, directed by Lee Toland Krieger, stars Blake Lively as Adaline, a kind of gorgeous modern creature inspired by Greek mythology who is struck by lightning and stops aging at 29, in 1937.

The film is now playing at the Criterion Bow Tie Cinemas.

It’s one of the film’s ironies that the movie, which flashbacks you into all the loves and eras of Adaline’s life, itself feels aged and even dusty. 

The photography is bathed primarily in a filtered tone somewhere between sepia and age-spot brown, making this one of the very few movies in my mortal experience of movie-going from which I emerged ever so slightly queasy.

Which is also to say that I was engaged and moved by the film. For who, even in the most secret chambers of their skeptical heart, doesn’t really hope for immortality?

The argument that the film intelligently engages is that immortality comes with a downside: Everyone around you becomes old and gray and dies, and you are left alone.

Our heroine has a daughter Flemming, played gamely by Ellen Burstyn, who becomes so old and grey that, to avoid embarrassment and not to have to reveal her secret, Adaline must introduce as her mother.

Yet no matter how many times the gray and then white-haired Flemming calls the eternally young Adaline mother,” you just never get used to it. That, I guess, is the point. This may also be the first film in which a mother gives some thought to checking her daughter into an assisted living facility.

Yet Adaline’s bigger problem is love — or rather, the lack of it. She’s become a kind of ice princess. Although she falls in love numerous times over the decades, she can never emotionally consummate any of the relationships. That would involve revealing her secret, which might make her a curiosity at best and a lab experiment at worst.

Therefore, for most of the decades of the story, Adaline’s best friend is her dog. Dogs just love you, after all, don’t ask questions, and don’t know if you’re mortal or immortal. When she enters her San Francisco Chinatown apartment, closes up her three or four locks against the ever-changing, aging, decaying world out there, and yells honey, I’m home,” it’s always four legs that come running. But of course the dogs die too, and the movie gives us many sequences in which Adaline looks at albums of their photographs. So many lovers to say goodbye to. So many Cocker Spaniels to put to sleep.

The movie’s engine idles in this compromised but not un-interesting idyl of immortality for about an hour. Then, yes, the next guy Adaline meets is Ellis Jones (Michiel Huisman).

He’s cool and handsome, a former college kid who discovered an algorithm, got rich on tech, and is now spending his time taking photographs of old San Francisco and preserving old buildings. Talk about having stuff in common.

This guy is hard to resist. Yet when Adaline gives into love and consents to be introduced to Ellis’s parents, guess who’s at dinner?

Ellis’s dad, William (a goateed Harrison Ford), is one of the great loves of Adaline’s life — from the 1960s, when William was a young graduate student in astronomy in England. He was going to propose to Adaline the night she just disappeared, as is her wont.

The movie engages, finally, dramatically, at this point because — from this point on, big spoiler alert — he recognizes her. Adaline gamely lies, telling William that it’s her mother that he knew in England. But he’s not buying. The likeness is too perfect.

The trouble starts for William’s relationships with his own wife Kathy (Kathy Baker), and also, of course, with Ellis. As the fraught weekend goes on, William notices on her wrist a scar, from a cut he himself sutured when they were dating. He tears into his archive of old photographs, confirms the scar and the location, and forces Adaline to admit it is she.

She has to flee again, even though William pleads with her, All these years you’ve lived, but you’ve never had a life.” He begs her to stay, for Ellis, his son. Stay, don’t run.”

I don’t know how,” she says.

I love this kind of stuff. But even I have to say that ultimately Age of Adaline feels like an overstuffed episode of The Twilight Zone. In the opening over-voice to explain the initial accident that makes Adaline immortal, the narrator even strikes the same friendly yet vaguely threatening tone that Rod Serling did.

Yet the movie’s most grievous problem is that it throws away its best drama. When a father and a son love the same woman, you have, potentially, a magnificent story, as the great 19th century novelist Ivan Turgenev gave us in his novella, First Love.” Alas, there is none of that here. The status-quo threatening competitiveness is barely engaged before the film is almost over, and the viewer even has to endure a dramatically unearned denouement.

Still, I’m glad I saw this film. With the movie’s magic and the bathing darkness of the Criterion, during the viewing I didn’t feel I aged one bit.

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