The Age of Adaline movie review (2015)

This sounds more compelling than it plays, at least at first. As written by J. Mills Goodloe and Salvador Paskowitz and directed by Lee Toland Krieger, "Adaline" starts off handsome but dramatically inert. The third-person storybook narration drifts in and out as needed. The imagery—though shot through with fairy tale special effects and meticulous re-creations of period cityscapes, cars and costumes—feels more literary than cinematic: a slide show illustrating a novel that never was. The casting of the leads doesn't add any spark. Lively is a poised restrained beauty, but the script treats her character as a figurine with no discernible interior life, and the actress does nothing to contradict that impression. She's not bad, not great, just competent, and present. (There are moments where the storybook narration evokes "Amelie" and "A Very Long Engagement," which likewise keep their heroines at arm's length, but Lively is no Audrey Tatou.)

Michiel Huisman fares no better as Ellis Jones, the first man to win Adaline's heart in decades. Although he displayed off-kilter charisma in HBO's "Treme" and "Game of Thrones," he's asked to play a conventional 2015 male ingenue here: a bland dreamboat with kind eyes, a well-trimmed beard and mustache, and rock-hard abs. Ellis wants them to spend the rest of their lives together, but Adaline (who now goes by Jenny) can't find the nerve to tell him why this can't happen. She's nice, he's nice, they can't be nice together. It's a sad predicament, but there's no tension in it.

Then Harrison Ford and Kathy Baker show up as Ellis' parents, William and Kathy Jones, who've been married for forty years. Suddenly "The Age of Adaline" locks into the right tone and rarely steps wrong. William is struck by Jenny's resemblance to his lost love, Adaline, with whom he had a brief but intense affair in the '60s. Adaline is as rattled by William as he is by her; then she recovers and says Adaline was her mother, and that she died long ago. Rather than defuse the situation, the lie sends William into a depressive spiral of drinking, agonized flashbacks, and awkward confessions that set his wife on edge. "You should see her face when you talk about her," she tells him. We have seen his face. It's devastating. Ford's voice—always deep, lowered an octave by age and one more by William's longing—is even more powerful. This is Ford's best performance since "The Fugitive," maybe since "Witness."