“I’m a good American,” insists Adaline (Blake Lively). At the moment, she’s being accosted by a couple of nameless and mostly faceless FBI agents, who’ve stopped her on the sidewalk in order to ask her “a few questions.” Actually, one man adds while they push her into the back seat of their odious sedan, “We’re just going to run a few tests.”
Eeek. The scene comes early in The Age of Adaline, and makes plain the fear Adaline feels at the hands of such agents. Whether or not she is a “good American” is beside the point for Lee Toland Krieger’s movie, but it’s a useful, if strange, emotional shorthand here, as it aligns you with Adaline, a pretty 29-year-old who has no particular thought about what it means to be an American or any other sort of citizen. In this, of course, Adaline is like most viewers, ready to take as plot gospel that scary men in suits are reason enough for her vague self-declaration and also her less than sensible choices going forward.
These choices have to do with her “condition,” the reason the men might want to “run a few tests,” that is, she doesn’t age. The reason for that is whimsical, not mattering a bit for the metaphor the film pursues: immortality as an impediment to romance. She is “immune to the ravages of time,” according to narrator Hugh Ross — reprising the sweet-but-arch tone he used in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford — which has to do with faux climate science and medical lore, anoxic reflexes and slowed heart rates and lightning and “magical” snow in Sonoma County. Short version: none of this nonsense is worth sorting out.
If you take as truth that Adaline’s condition makes it hard for her to be a good American in the sense that she’s unable to have a boyfriend, okay. This is premised on the narrative business that in order to hide her condition, she changes her identity and location every ten years, and so she leaves behind friends or acquaintances, feels sad and alone. For the purposes of the film, she meets a special boyfriend, and so she goes on to wrestle with the sorts of questions alternately reserved for vampires or maybe the time travelers in The Time Traveler’s Wife, About Time, or Kate & Leopold.
As in these situations, the primary problem posed by The Age of Adaline is how to live — forever — with a lie. If vampires have particular consuming habits they prefer to hide, men (and they’re mostly men) who time travel tend to use their gifts to manipulate their romantic objects. Adaline’s solutions are at once more elegant, practical, and self-punishing. She doesn’t try to manipulate anything except money — this occurs off screen — and she mourns her inability to have a boyfriend. She does have a very understanding daughter, who grows up to be Ellen Burstyn, with shades of Inception.
Still, Adaline’s loneliness is unsustainable: she’s living in a romance, after all. This romance contrives for her a gonzo obstacle and plot around it. The first step in her transition is embodied by a wealthy, handsome, apparently perfect boyfriend, here named Ellis (Michiel Huisman). He decides on seeing her read a Braille book in a public space that she’s The One. His pursuit of her is forceful, not to say creepy. At this point, Adaline is 107 years old, and might know better, but love is what it is, and so she doesn’t.
You know this means she’ll be found out, and while that anticipation doesn’t make for much tension or even compelling drama, the film does lapse into the usual sort of narrative trap that such protagonists must suffer, in her case, sleeping with men who are related to each other, namely Ellis and his dad, William (Harrison Ford, who is played as in flashbacks by the uncannily-like-him Anthony Ingruber). That the men are actually okay with this state of affairs — they’re more instantly concerned with how much they both love Adaline so very much — is initially unnerving, and then, not. For their focus, and their lack of ego, turns the movie’s focus around too, so it’s less about Adaline’s special-seeming dilemma and more about how she and everyone else might understand pasts, forgive mistakes, and look forward.
In this sense, The Age of Adaline is also slightly less a generic romance (though it is that, too) and more a consideration of time and desire, how each shapes the other, and how both affect imaginative horizons. Here, William becomes the measure of what might be expanded. In part this has to do with Ford’s completely lovely performance, but it also has to do with his face as such. Weathered and vast, quirky and revealing but also elusive, Ford’s face reminds you of why you like movies, why big screens are fantastic opportunities, and why you’re hoping that the new Star Wars is even half good.