The Age of Adaline (2015)

Film: The Age of Adaline (2015)
Stars: Blake Lively, Michiel Huisman, Harrison Ford, Ellen Burstyn, Kathy Baker
Director: Lee Toland Krieger
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

I initially thought while going into The Age of Adaline that I had never actually seen Blake Lively act before.  This proved incorrect when I left the theater and double-checked on IMDB (I have seen The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, The Town, and The Green Lantern), so clearly she had not made much of an impression on me.  I was never drawn into Gossip Girl, her signature part, and really just knew her from her constant presence on the red carpet and celebrity marriage to Ryan Reynolds.  Not always a great place to be for an actress I'm about to review in what is her first leading role.

(Spoilers Ahead) But it's not the worst spot, as occasionally actresses surprise me, and not everything is bad in what looks like a potboiler-style film.  The movie is about Adaline Bowman (Lively), a woman who due to some freak accident with a car, some lightening, and some water (in science that even my Biology-befuddled-mind I knew sounded a bit silly), never ages.  She remains for the rest of her life the same youthful 29, eternally bound to being young and beautiful (I mean, if you're going to not age for the rest of your life there are worse places to be than Blake Lively), causing her to live a shadow-y non-existence, floating from one menial job to the other.  She seems happy enough, though always on auto-pilot, and still has a relationship with her daughter (the only person who knows her secret), who, by the time we hit the present day, has become Ellen Burstyn.

The film takes a turn when she falls in love with a handsome stranger named Ellis (Huisman, that hot guy from Game of Thrones, though really that doesn't corner things down much) and decides to take a brief turn into maybe having a real life, eventually meeting his parents, one of whom is a man she loved some forty years earlier named William (Ford).  The movie gets badly off-track from interesting melodrama to heavy-handed in the last thirty minutes with this relationship, with William discovering the secret and claiming that she needs to stay for Ellis, even though he seems to have become unhinged and is definitely wanting Adaline to stay for himself.  Actually, this borders from unhinged and into a bit demented-I'm not sure if Ford was trying something new here, but the entire performance that he was giving in the film was decidedly creepy and really made him look like a jerk; he's been married to Kathy Baker for forty years, and yet he still pines after this girl he randomly met in his youth?  It's disturbing, and the way that he imprints on his son his own feelings, trying to live vicariously-it's a bit sickening.  The film doesn't really have the parameters to go there (this is basically a Nicholas Sparks movie without the Nicholas Sparks), but this is something that I wish was either fully-explored or not discovered at all, because in this precarious situation I felt very uncomfortable for Adaline.

The film itself probably could have used a little bit more Adaline, which is odd since she's in almost every scene, but really the movie is all about her being passive, which doesn't really jive with the woman we meet in her 20's.  I would have loved to have seen a more ordinary look at how she ended up being this quiet, nonchalant woman, living a life of books and dogs and occasional visits from her daughter.  Maybe discover what her purpose has been the past forty years, because she seems so grounded, it's hard to imagine she didn't develop one after a while.  This would have helped give us some juxtaposition to the ending, which essentially sees her life only having a meaning when she gets a hot guy in it.  Lively's performance is occasionally quite masterful in this way-she knows how to have modulated fun in her role as Adaline, and unlike Ford, doesn't take melodrama as a reason to overact.  I would have liked to have seen a little bit more life in some of the lighter moments (the Trivial Pursuit scene seemed like a wasted opportunity), but overall this is the best I've seen Lively.  That's not necessarily a compliment (she's not giving greatness here), but it does have some promise and that's a start for an actress that, depending on the long-term success of this movie, could be around for a while longer at the cinema.

Those were my thoughts on this sudser, a film that feels very out-of-place in the cinemas of today, all wise and not willing to dream a bit, so I can't say I didn't like the movie, though I wouldn't recommend it at the same time (if you like 40's/50's melodramas, which generally I do, this is certainly for you).  What were your thoughts?  Has anyone seen The Age of Adaline?  Where do you weigh in?  Share your thoughts in the comments!