The Age of Adaline (2015)

This movie (and it is a movie-movie, about a woman who never grows older and what that does to her love-life) is, mostly, a really transporting little flight of fancy, plus some problems, and the main problem is that I hate voiceovers and this film has an appalling over-reliance on a particularly self-defeating one. In one section in particular, it could have been a ravishing ten-minute modern silent film, full of impressionistic imagery and classic montage, and we would have quite serenely got all the relevant points, but it is defiled by a rubbish voiceover with lots of pseudo-science reducing it to visual filler. Nonetheless, the director Lee Toland Krieger (nothing else of consequence) has an eye and clearly loves cinema. Scene upon scene comes to us gifted with unexpectedly memorable shots, and the cumulative effect is not only of a gratifyingly and valuably old-fashioned classical film, but it’s also as reminiscent of the 1970s stylised infatuation with classic Hollywood (perhaps by way of the Nouvelle Vague) as it is of the originals. One exception, that stands out for being such a slip-up, is a bad choice to go handheld in the film’s pivotal scene – the camera wobbling shouldn’t be a factor in your most important moment.

Reminiscences of old Hollywood also extend to some liberties and laziness in the plotting, where one character just happens to be super-rich so we don’t have to fuss about their incomes (as if we were going to? Why does he have to be super-rich?), a slightly exploitative dead dog (although it does add to the movement of the film) and another odd moment where Adaline has to feel apologetic about telling him to leave her alone. Apologise for what? He stalked you! Her regret doesn’t ring true (or rather, it’s annoying to see it imposed on her character) but evidently they were all so lost in the glory of movie-ness, these things seemed to sail past them. (To make up for it, the lovers get bonus points for reading Henry James – noice choice.) It might also be objected that a father and son both falling for the same woman who can’t age would earn an indulgent smile from Freud but it’s all presented with such nostalgic good faith that it calls our bluff.

Age of Adaline’s casual slipstream premise and earnest narrative engagement with that premise puts it in the same category as Passion Of Mind but it can also be filed with Focus – a modern self-conscious revival of the “they don’t make em like that anymore” vehicle for a glamorous movie star. Like Margot Robbie, Blake Lively doesn’t cede much to any Golden Age glamour-puss starlet and seeing her shot and lit well exposes how few films today know what to do with a great face. It’s also important to know that this film has Harrison Ford in it. I didn’t know he was in it (didn’t spot his name on the credits) and it is unbelievably disruptive to a film’s hold on your attention if Harrison Ford shows up in a movie when you weren’t expecting him. His arrival forms part of the already entirely foreseeable and daft but still quite good plot-twist, which generates some exquisitely awkward tension and minor suspense. Probably the whole film should be more philosophical and investigative of profound themes about life and mortality than it is, but once they’ve come up with their plot-twist, they find it irresistible and so do I, even though it colonises the remainder of the movie at the expense of anything more significant.

Resolving that crux, and wasting time on doggedly preparing and obeying the conventional formality of a cutely tidy ending, chews up the last twenty minutes, and even that could have been done with some élan, since the actual imagery for a lot of it is pure visual poetry, with its dreamy slow-mo and extreme close-ups, but no – the voiceover comes back and fucks it again. Spoiling the trance of it all leaves you wondering if maybe not much was achieved, if maybe the whole thing never rises above cheap banal romance clichés, if maybe liking this and Passion of Mind and Meet Joe Black betrays a lack of rigorous manly seriousness. But I do like these films, they have a humourlessly unironic quality that I admire, however minor the result. In this film’s case, you might even call it sincerity.

I was going to say one more thing about Age of Adaline but I have forgotten what it was!