The Age of Adaline

If you never aged like title character Adaline Bowman in this fantasy romance, wouldn’t you try to make life exciting? Jump out of more airplanes? Take more road trips? Read more? Youth is wasted on the young, we’d say, so why squander such a sweet ephemeral thing?

Never in our blandest imaginations would we want less—ridding ourselves of relationship and fleeing from the worlds we know best would be outlandish. Yet this is what The Age of Adaline (rated PG-13 for sexual innuendo and language) tries to convince us we’d do, and it’s such a baffling leap that we hardly see ourselves in the movie’s take on agelessness and Adaline’s desire to run from life.

After a freak car accident in the 1920s keeps Adaline (Blake Lively) a wrinkle-free beauty for the next eight decades, she’s left making up excuses for her unchanging face. Growing weary of the gossip, Adaline abandons her school-age daughter and moves away, drifting in and out of life but never actually living it. She leaves lovers, dispassionately dumps friends, and slips out of jobs all before anyone catches on. And for what—because she couldn’t face the gossip?

The movie claims Adaline feared becoming a guinea pig for science, but her life choices leave such a torrent of relational and emotional destruction that life as a lab rat almost sounds more appealing. It would have been more reasonable—and perhaps more entertaining—if Lively’s Adaline had channeled some of Bill Murray’s ageless wit in Groundhog Day, or even Brad Pitt’s melancholy in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. In those films, we see someone maturing in a meaningful way even as time does strange things with their bodies.

Adaline’s self-imposed identity crisis catches up to her when she meets Ellis Jones (Michiel Huisman) and his canny father (Harrison Ford) but sadly by then, the viewer will likely have already aged enough to realize growing old might not be such a bad thing.