The Age of Adaline

Released 2015. Director: Lee Toland Krieger

GROWING OLD IS THE MOST NATURAL THING. It’s happening to all of us, right this moment. And yet the wish to go against nature is tremendous, if only judging by the billion-dollar industry in anti-aging treatments. You can’t stop the aging process; nobody can. But that doesn’t stop people from trying, and wishing.

In this regard Adaline is the luckiest woman ever lived, because she doesn’t age. Courtesy of a freak incident that involves a bolt of lightning, Adaline has been stuck at the age of 27, year after year after year. Some might regard this as a miracle, especially when Adaline is blessed with the looks of Blake Lively. But there is a price to pay.

Adaline is unable to commit to any long-term relationship without causing suspicion as her appearance doesn't change while everyone around her ages. Every decade or so she runs away, a new name in a new town, starting all over. The only person she keeps in contact with is her daughter who, at the time the story is told, is played by then 83-year-old Ellen Burstyn. Imagine the absurdity to see Ellen Burstyn calling Blake Lively mother.

How the two first came to accept this inexplicable phenomenon is never explained. They just did. In the present day Adaline, whose current name is Jennifer, meets Ellis at a New Year’s Eve party and the man is smitten. Adaline tries to resist but Ellis is very persistent, you could even say he’s a stalker. He invites her over to his bachelor's loft with a view of the glittering city lights. He organises a visit to some private planetarium. He also cooks. The movie spends so much time swooning over the couple there’s no way Adaline is not going to break her own promise and take a chance with this hirsute charmer.

Now up to this point we’ve been intermittently shown flashbacks of Adaline’s past lives, as it were. One of them involves her running away from a man who’s about to propose. Fast forward to the present day again and Adaline, doing what a sensible woman in her position should never contemplate, travels with Ellis to meet his parents. The very second Ellis’s dad sees Adaline and before they’re introduced, he calls her by her real name and from the look on her face, they had a past.

Turns out George, that’s the dad played by Harrison Ford, was the guy with a ring in his hand when Adaline abandoned him nearly five decades ago. Adaline lies and says that must be my mum you just described, but George isn’t all that convinced. The next day she confesses to George and leaves. Ellis rushes after her but Adaline gets in a car accident. Spoiler alert: she survives, again.

You’d have to be a diehard romantic to get sucked into this. I don’t know how anyone could empathise with Adaline, who is simply wasting all the years she’s been given. I also don’t know how anyone, after learning the shocking truth, could continue to pursue a relationship with the woman your dad nearly married nearly 50 years ago. Fifty years ago!

The movie has that fuzzy, gauzy, hazy feel that nothing matters but love, in a way that doesn’t consider normal human behaviour. Has Ellis considered how his mum feels when he’s dating dad’s old girlfriend? I’d like to sit in at their family dinner to observe. Pour me another glass, this is too good to miss. As for Adaline, does she really think this will work, or will her presence just going to dredge up ill will? She’s seen how George’s wife got all upset the first time. Yet she doesn’t seem to care.

The movie only cares about one thing and that’s projecting a kind of unreal romantic notion about a woman who drifts through time, ditches every man who ever loved her and finally decides to give it a go with the son of the man who wanted to marry her. Not only does George still looks at her the way he used to, Adaline still has feelings for him, part of it guilt. Yet the movie simply shrugs, ignores the obvious and only wants us to sigh and think how lovely it all ends up for Adaline and Ellis, now that nature intervenes again and she can finally age properly, a 27-year-old who is really 108. This is not romantic, it’s twisted.

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