Starring: Blake Lively, Michiel Huisman, Harrison Ford, Ellen Burstyn, and Kathy Baker
Distributor: Entertainment One Films
Runtime: 113 mins. Reviewed in Apr 2015
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This American fantasy-drama tells the story of a woman, who is made ageless through a motor car accident. Well after the accident, she falls in love with a man, who, like everyone else around him, ages normally.
There are multiple movies which take up the themes of immortality and time distortion. Some of them put their characters back into the past, or propel them into the future, or move them both backwards and forwards through time. Time is a familiar theme in the cinema, and movies love to play with it.
This movie depicts a woman for whom time stands still, while for others around her it does not. All time-distortion movies make the central point that situations or circumstances are an inevitable part of the fabric of human life. Whoever we are, (they say), circumstances or situations strongly govern or determine what we do and think.
Adaline Bowman (Blake Lively) is the person in question. She crashes her car while driving alone on a dark road one stormy night, and she emerges from the crash immune from the effects of time. Nothing rational can explain what has happened to her, and all we know is that a flash of lightning has caused the problem and the process responsible is one of electron conversion.
Born in 1908, Adaline has remained 29 years old for nearly eighty years. Because of her situation, she leads a solitary existence and withdraws into herself whenever she is tempted to get too close to anyone she might care for, and she is on the move constantly to protect her identity. The only person who knows her secret is her daughter, Flemming (Ellen Burstyn), who now looks a lot older than her mother.
By chance one day at a New Year’s Eve Party, Adaline meets a rich, attractive young man, called Ellis Jones (Michiel Huisman), to whom she is attracted romantically. She realises that she wants things in life that she has never had, and her feelings for Ellis gradually put pressure on her to reveal her secret. Ellis’ parents are played by Harrison Ford and Kathy Baker, and Adaline has met one of them before. She finds herself being forced to decide wether or not she wishes to trade immortality (a familiar theme in time distortion movies), for the chance of a normal relationship with Ellis.
This is a romance film with an unusual fantasy edge to it. The closest movie is probably Frank Capra’s “Lost Horizon” (1937) where the residents of an idyllic valley are immune to the effects of ageing, and where love eventually causes a reversal of the spell.
The relationship between Ellis and Adaline works well on screen, and there is definite chemistry between the movie’s two main leads. The film, however, deals only superficially with its major concerns. Living forever is the issue for Adaline, and the film treats immortality as a sophisticated, problematic lifestyle choice for Adaline, bypassing any deeper significance for the theme. For example, there is no philosophical or thinking exploration by Adaline, or anyone else in the movie, of the consequences of the fact that Adaline has passed beyond the influence of death.
One especially interesting consequence of the movie is that it exposes viewers ironically to ageing actors, like Harrison Ford (in a relatively infrequent screen appearance), Ellen Burstyn, and Kathy Baker, who have looked terrific in their prime. The film raises the question whether their acting prowess has stayed intact, despite the fact that time for them has not stood still. It is comforting to know, that even when the story-line gets extraordinarily mushy, Harrison Ford acts the socks off anyone else around.
There is a classic Hollywood romantic feel and look to this movie. It is Nicholas Sparks’s territory (just like the very recent “The Longest Ride”, 2015), but unlike “The Longest Ride” it trades classic Hollywood romance eventually for soap. The movie plummets to hidden depths when Adaline realises that Ellis’ father is the man she once dated and had an affair with, as a hippie years before, and whom she loved at the time. The murky web of sentimentality, combined with soulful regret, eventually ensnares everyone on the screen.
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