3.5/5
Adaline Bowman, played by the gorgeous and talented Blake Lively, seems to be the Platonically ideal woman — intelligent, boundlessly versed, and possessed a kind of Golden Age joie de vivre that gleams through even the most anodized of self-imposed defenses. Her face, let alone the rest of her body, appears to have never been so much as stalked by the specter of senescence. One afternoon, the library at which she works invites her to sort through a collection of old celluloid film segments and prepare them for digitization.
We discover very quickly that Adaline is, as her cautiously detached temperament suggests, no ordinary human being. In a sequence that struck me as particularly Benjamin Button, the film backpedals through the details of a decades-long mythology beginning with a car accident in the fledgling years of the 20th Century and continuing into the present day. When Adaline’s car ran off a bridge and into an ice-cold lake, her body temperature sank to eighty-seven degrees, her metabolism slowed to a crawl, and her heartbeat, as if a punctuation, stopped. It was then that she and her car were struck by lighting, and aside from being jolted back to life, Adaline Bowman, through an electrodynamic process that, as the narrator describes, won’t be discovered until the 2030’s, stopped aging.
At first, she pays her accident nothing beyond immediate mind. She continues to live her life and raise her only daughter. Therein lay the problem — as her daughter grew and matured, people around her started to notice that her mother did anything but. An acquaintance of Adaline sees her one day with her college-age daughter and is completely flabbergasted by their apparent resemblance in age. So striking is her timelessness that eventually, even the police require a birth certificate to confirm her age. Eventually, Adeline is apprehended by authorities for research purposes, and in fear that she will forever exist as a specimen to be tested and awed over, she flees and begins a cycle of abandonment and emotional seclusion. She lives in one place, develops an identity long enough for people to take notice of her before disappearing for a new life elsewhere, living in constant fear of being discovered or recognized. This continues for 60 years until the year 2014, when she meets an odd, overzealous suitor at a New Years celebration.
You might wonder why I described Adaline’s accident in such acute detail. I did it because the film does precisely the same thing, and after a certain point, one is left wondering why. Turning Adeline’s condition into an intricately mapped pseudoscientific mechanism begs questions the movie has no interest in addressing. If it’s to do with telomeres within her cells, does that affect the way her cells divide? If so, do her wounds heal differently than other people? It can’t, as a scene later in the movie proves, so how does it all work? Ultimately, it’s explained away almost immediately by something so thoroughly Star Trek that you wonder why they bothered legitimizing it with science. Why not just say she never ages and leave it at that? You could argue that this is nothing but high-minded quibbling, but it’s symptomatic of a larger issue. The writing often spills over into tacked-on intellectual waxing to cushion its contrivances and flights of fancy, as if to lend itself a certain credibility that it, in its deepest nerve, doesn’t feel its earned otherwise. That’s an odd thing, because as it stands, the film only ever feels unconvincing when it feels the need to justify itself. Watching it, I felt the need to remind the writers not to be so anxious — I was with them to begin with.
This is, to be clear, a minor gripe. The film goes to refreshing lengths to flesh out its characters and their relationships, so much so that the immersion in the factual curiosities and intellectual winks and nudges mentioned earlier ceases to be a distraction and becomes one of the film’s many charms. These people don’t exist simply to fulfill their motivations or to become a cog in some narrative machine. They think and feel for themselves, and they have knowledge and ideas that they wish to share with the world but often can’t. There were things I liked about them as well as certain habits that annoyed me, almost like real, flesh-and-blood minds. Yes, in the end, these details are little more than imposed eccentricities, but is that such a bad thing? In a treacle of assembly-line movies virtually (and sometimes intentionally) free of personality, this one stretches to attain one. I find that not only admirable but enormously satisfying, especially when talking about a production as big and shiny as this one.
As the film began moving into the third act, I began to feel settling into something perfunctory rather than detouring into the more fascinating territory its twists and turns suggest. At one hour and fifty three minutes, the movie is fair in its length, and yet I couldn’t help wonder where it would have taken its characters with even more room to breath and explore. One example: just as the film begins to settle into a rhythm, the introduction of a character played by Harrison Ford took me completely by surprise. I was absolutely stunned, sterilized of all expectation. The rug had been completely yanked, and where the movie would go next, I didn’t dare say. Yet what ultimately transpires is, sadly, rather inconsequential. Oh it’s interesting, certainly — the movie is never anything less than that — but if it had run half an hour longer, perhaps even an hour longer, it could have unspooled something of ecstatic flavor and complexity and delved deeply into the subtle tragedies of Adeline’s life. Philosophically, I’m opposed to judging the movie you wanted instead of the movie you got, and yet the one I saw for a brief moment was so rich, so fulfilling.
But enough of that. To linger on it further is to suggest that the movie I got is neither rich nor fulfilling on its own terms, and it’s very much both of those things. All too rarely are audiences treated to a big-budget Hollywood romance that treats them with this much respect and maturity.
Spencer Moleda is a freelance writer, script supervisor, and motion picture researcher residing in Los Angeles, California. His experience ranges from reviewing movies to providing creative guidance to fledgling film projects. You can reach him at: www.spencermoleda.com
Spencer Moleda is a freelance writer, script supervisor, and motion picture researcher residing in Los Angeles, California. His experience ranges from reviewing movies to providing creative guidance to fledgling film projects. You can reach him at: [email protected]