The Age of Adeline (2015) - movie review

The age of Adaline (2015) – rating (3/5)

Cast : Blake Lively, Ellen Burstyn, Harrison Ford, Michiel Huisman

Directed by Lee Toland Krieger

Review by Zulfiqar

            The point that the Adaline’s story is kept focused onto a personal level is probably the movie’s redeeming quality. The story writers J Mills Goodloe and Salvador Paskowitz weave the story on a few persons, who come in contact with Adaline, from principally her POV and also by the new narrative style of ‘Amelie’ and ‘the curious case of Benjamin Button’. This new type of commentary by the narrator while relating the historical events concerned with the principal character and his/her story probably had its origins from ‘Zelig’. But it gives a sort of inquisitive pip to the proceedings.

            The tone of the movie however is placid and you get accustomed to the tenor at the start, when you realize that it will be a gentle pitter-patter of screenplay, but not of a conspiracy thriller. The story is plain and simple. A certain Adaline of San Francisco had stopped her aging when she was in her late twenties due to an accident, which occurred in mid 1930s. The moment, which leads to this mind-bending phenomenon, occurred due to an aberration in some geo-cosmic disturbance. The narrator sums up this in two separate spurts of reciting. One at the mid-way through the movie and the other at the end.

            Adaline sees her daughter (Ellen Burstyn) grow up to become an eighty-year old, while she hides her identity by trotting all over the map of America, in fear of becoming a curiosity. Love, that eternal bugger, bites her repeatedly and though she had been escaping its dragnets, knows it won’t be for long before she gets caught in it. She doesn’t imagine that her current lover could be the son of her former.

            Director Lee Toland Krieger keeps the proceedings laced with the mild tenderness of romance and the value of lost-relationships. But he becomes a little conservative while detailing the years of Adaline with a very few historical occurrences. There is this tendency to follow in the line of Forrest Gump and or that of Benjamin Button, but at sometimes, it catches cold feet so as to mark its own identity. It certainly would have been a false ploy to follow other such inspirations because despite having no such masterstroke of keeping the calendar of Adeline, the movie is engaging.

            The factors here are of course the pretty lead, Blake Lively. She looks like a fresh blow of youth and vivacity in every frame she is seen. Her elegant taking a notch down of the boys, who try to flirt with her, is just entertaining to watch. Michiel Huisman rightly plays that sweet, handsome man, who is head over heels with her, and is ready to lose everything before his dame. Harrison Ford as her old flame has some of his moments. The old trips down the memory lane have a nostalgic feel to them. The interaction between senile daughter of Ellen Burstyn and young mother of Adaline has a natural element of mother-daughter bonding.

            The problem at the end with ‘the age of Adaline’ lies in its too simple a story and a climax too easy to surmise. It doesn’t have a devious way of expectant fooling, because the movie falls under the category to be felt rather than to be weighed in for quality. Emotions are sifted by the feel rather than the gloss of production. The latter is appreciated by David Lanzenberg’s cinematography of slanting San Francisco roads, green verdant woods of London and countryside estate of Joneses. The period set decoration by Teresa Brauer and Shannon Gottieb fill in the fleeting points of the history side of the story. The emotional connect is established with its easily-blendable cast. But with its thin plot, the scope of emotions doesn’t fill in the long, dull gaps of the movie.