Although “The Age of Adaline” looked as if it would be a grand, timeless love story about a woman who cannot grow old with anyone, but finds love anyways, it had me wishing time would go faster as my eyes could not stay open 10 minutes into it. Not even Blake Lively’s face could make me enjoy this movie, and that is saying something.
“I was seriously disappointed with the way the story played out and not the ‘I want to know more!’ disappointment, but the ‘Great, it’s over, can we leave now?'” says junior Sam Orefice.
“The Age of Adaline” brings a boring tone to the normal “rom-com”, cheesy love stories. It begins in present day with Adaline Bowmen (Lively), who works at a library and enjoys going through antique books and old tape reels. As she watches one marked “News Reel Year 1908”, we find out she was the first baby born on New Year’s Day in 1908.
The narrator, voiced by Hugh Ross (who sounds like he’s voicing a children’s movie), later describes the terrible car accident she was in that caused her immortality. Supposedly, the freezing water her car took a head first dive into, mixed with a lightning bolt, resembles the magic of the fountain of youth, but I don’t buy it.
The movie makes it out to look like Adaline suddenly knows she’ll never age after the accident and, as time goes on, she will realize that people are noticing and that is not good. As she’s walking with her daughter, Flemming (Ellen Burstyn for most of the movie), who is the only person who knows about Adaline’s life, a friend stops her saying “You haven’t changed a bit!”
After a close encounter with the law during the Eisenhower “Who’s a communist?” Era, Adaline decides it is time to take action, and she tells her daughter that she is going to have to move and change her identity every decade, and that from now on, Flemming will have to introduce her as her friend, not her mother.
Back to present day, Jenny, as she now goes by, lives a solitary life with her original dog’s great-great-great grandpuppy, until she locks eyes with the rich, know-it-all, almost-too-humble Ellis Jones (Michiel Huisman); he almost instantly falls in love with her. As he tries to build a relationship with Adaline, she pushes him away because, as she tells her daughter, “It’s not the same when there’s no growing old together. Without that, love is just heartbreak.”
Eventually Adaline does fall for him, even though it is time for her to move away again. She meets his parents, and things get weird. The father, played by Harrison Ford, is bewildered by the fact that “Jenny” looks identical to a girl he used to be very close with.
With all the things wrong with this movie, it surprises me that there was no one throughout the whole production that said, “Isn’t there something missing in this? Like a plot line?” Although some of the acting was not completely amateur, Blake Lively, known for her incredible role as Serena van der Woodsen in “Gossip Girl”, could have picked a role a little less… boring? The only thing that actually grabbed my interest about the whole thing was the costume design, brilliantly done by Academy Award winner Angus Strathie.
“The clothes were the only thing that made up for the terrible story and time jumps,” says junior Kim Caputo.
Between trying to keep my eyes open and desperately hoping for some kind of thrilling plot twist (which never came), I realized that paying seven dollars for a ticket to sit in a theater that smells like urine to watch a movie that could quite possibly be funny with its missing plot points was quite ridiculous. Adaline may have had time to waste, but I sure did not.
Who's aspects of the movie were you most disappointed with in The Age of Adaline?
The acting
The plot
The direction
The actors
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