Review: The age of Adaline (2015)

My ratingIMDbRotten Tomatoes
CriticsAudienceCriticsAudience
7/1051/1007.4/1054%71%
Numbers obtained from IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes on May 6, 2015.

The idea of never getting old seems attractive to many people. However, as we see in “The Age of Adaline,” being stuck with the same age forever is not a good thing: you outlive everyone you care about.

In this movie, Adaline (Blake Lively) is a young married woman at the beginning of the 1900s who, one day, after a car accident, stops aging. So she stays 29 years old for almost 80 years. That means living a very lonely life, since she can’t really tell anyone the reason why she doesn’t get a day older. The only one who knows her secret is her daughter, who starts to look older than her own mother. To avoid having to answer questions from anyone curious, Adaline moves from one place to another during all these years, always changing her identity.

Flash-forward to the present: she meets Ellis Jones (Michiel Huisman), a philanthropist who falls in love with her and brings romance back into her life. This relationship changes drastically her routine and she is forced to make hard choices.

The best thing about the film, for me, was Blake Lively’s performance and wardrobe. Since she is stuck in the 1920s, she acts like that: the way she talks and the way she walks is not usual nowadays. It is a good movie, but I felt like it took too long for it to really start. The constant narration also annoyed me a little bit and I didn’t really buy the sudden romance between Adaline and Ellis. There is another relationship in the movie that convinced me more (but I won’t spoil it). But it was a little depressing to see that she’s been living for over 100 years and doesn’t really have anyone in her life…

Leave a Reply