The Age of Adaline - film review

The Age of Adaline is serious piffle. It's serious with that enraptured solemnity we expect from Mills & Boon or from Nicholas Sparks, though none of those is responsible here. Lee Toland Krieger directs the multi-screenwritered story of Adaline (Blake Lively) who loses, in a car crash, the ability to age. Immortal at a stroke! We get some overvoiced words of pseudoscience at the collision site, then the story. Guarding her secret, staying young while her own daughter ages into Ellen Burstyn, Adaline lives a nomadic love life. A few weeks here, there. Until she meets handsome Ellis (Michiel Huisman) . . .

It's as if The Curious Case of Benjamin Button had a spare plot button secreted in its tailoring. It's not quite a smiley button - Lively defies her name by acting with a wan, seraphic, unvarying melancholy - but it wears well enough for two hours. The film jumps to life with a late Harrison Ford cameo. He humanises the story, particularises it, makes it real. Then it's back to the schmaltz for a final, gift-papered wrap-up.

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