Checking our Blake Lively’s credits, she has been in six movies I’ve seen without leaving the slightest impression. Blake has a willowy beauty but it is too bland, her body and face lack resolution, and she isn’t a good enough actress to get away with it. Till now.
Blake portrays Adaline Bowman, a woman who due to a freak accident, has stopped aging at 29 and 79 years later, with only her old age daughter and a collection of dogs dying generation after generation to keep her company, she is frankly sick of it. A beautiful woman forced to blend in, Blake as Adaline is quite terrific, she has the reticience of age, and the manners of a different generation. After several run ins with inquisitive FBI agents, she has taken to uprooting her life every ten years. As the anniversary approaches, her daughter (a wonderful Ellen Burstyn with a child like glee) is thinking of entering a retirement home and the attentions of a young man, Michiel Huisman, has her confused.
And then disaster strikes: somebody recognizes her.
If “The Age Of Adaline” sounds exciting, it isn’t, a terrible narrator takes care of that, and though it is a beautiful looking movie, set in San Francisco, still it has little use for its basic premise, Adaline leaves the audience as distant as everybody else in the world, and the sheer joy you’d expect, a sort of past-future axis, is blown off completely.The best scene, Adaline giving a nervous apology, has nothing to do with aging.
Still, Harrison Ford as her boyfriend’s husband is terrific, and Blake underplays her role beautifully: she has an old time 40s movie quality I have never noticed before and while the role is difficult, it is always hard to play a cipher, she is always worth watching.
Directed by Lee Toland Krieger, who has another couple of credits to his name though I haven’t seen them, with a stateliness that borders without tipping over into boredom, it underuses its premise but makes up for it by getting a great performance by Blake
Grade: B-