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In Memoriam 1942 – 2013 | ROGEREBERT..COM Choose a Section REVIEWS THE AGE OF ADALINE | Matt Zoller Seitz April 24, 2015 | 9 Not many movies go from "eh" to "wow." "The Age of Adaline" is one of them. Print Page "Gossip Girl" star Blake Lively plays the title character, a woman who meets and loses her husband during the construction of the Golden Gate bridge, then Like miraculously survives a car wreck and emerges as an ageless being whose looks are frozen at age 28. She can be killed, but she will never die of natural causes or Like 76 succumb to the usual ravages of time, which gives her relationship with her daughter (played as an older woman by Ellen Burstyn) a fairy tale or horror movie 0 aspect. (It's sort of a vampire film minus the bloodsucking.) Adaline spends the rest of her life running from entanglements of every kind. Whenever anyone gets hip to the fact that she never ages and wonders if there's something odd about that, she slips away in the night and starts over as someone else. 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 and intriguingly 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 just the right tone and rarely steps wrong. William is struck by Jenny's resemblance to his great lost love, Adaline, with whom he had a brief but intense affair in the '60s. Adaline is as rattled by him as he is by her, but she recovers and says Adaline was her mother, and that she died a long time 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." Sigmund Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia" might as well be the film's secret other screenplay. Something about the configuration of characters and secrets in the Jones house strikes uncanny notes, plunging the movie into a tender fugue state. Suddenly a stable and mutually nourishing marriage is shaken by a husband's rekindled love affair with a woman who (in theory) no longer exists, and whose absence he'd accepted long ago. This is not a May-September romance. There are too many complications and mysteries and too much elapsed time for things to resolve that way. It's a tragedy of a love that can no longer be. This twist triggers a flood of simple but big emotions, and "The Age of Adaline" wades into it with confidence, laying out all four major characters' predicaments with sympathy and intelligence, and never shying away from the sentimentality at the heart of every scene and line. Lively and Huisman spring to life; instead of writing them off as inoffensive eye candy, you start to appreciate them as actors, and see shadings in their characters that weren't apparent before. Krieger's direction sharpens up as well. The last half-hour of "The Age of Adaline" has a symphonic purity of feeling, piecing together simple closeups and elegantly choreographed wide shots so intuitively that the story seems to be telling itself. There are moments that may remind viewers of "Somewhere in Time," another doomed love story whose glaring faults receded once the film started plucking the audience's heartstrings like a virtuoso cellist. (Christopher Reeve! John Barry! That penny!) The concluding moral diminishes what came before; it makes the film seem like a glorified self-help manifesto about the necessity of commitment when it's really a dream of love lost, found and redefined. Nevertheless: wow. I've never seen a less involving movie become so compelling at the exact moment when you've resigned to write it off as just okay. What happened? Maybe the lived-in authority of Ford and Baker served as an emotional tuning fork and helped the second half find its pitch. Or maybe this is another case of a big-budget movie getting so wrapped up in creating pretty images that it failed to notice that its first half wasn't working. No matter: this is powerful film, often in spite of itself. You want it to break converted by Web2PDFConvert.com your heart, and it does. Ads by Adblade More Reviews and a Few Great Offers! 75 Rare Historical Photos That Will Leave You Speechless converted by Web2PDFConvert.com 16 Child Stars Who Grew Up To Be Super Attractive! converted by Web2PDFConvert.com Beverly Hills Plastic Surgeon's Way To Remove Dark Spots Without Surgery. converted by Web2PDFConvert.com "The way you live, retire, and invest-it could all soon change in ways most Americans don't expect" converted by Web2PDFConvert.com If You Have Gas, Bloating, Constipation Or An Upset Stomach Please Watch This Video converted by Web2PDFConvert.com Surprising Ways to Reduce Neuropathy Nerve Pain POPULAR BLOG POSTS Who do you read? Good Roger, or Bad Roger? Roger Ebert This message came to me from a reader named Peter Sv ensland. He and a fr... Thirtieth Anniversary of "A View to a Kill" Gerardo Valero An essay on John Glen's 1985 Bond film, "A View to a Kill," in honor of its thirtieth anniv ersary . The Children of Midian: Returning to Clive Barker’s “Nightbreed” Ian Grey A personal reconsideration of Cliv e Barker's "Nightbreed" in light of its Blu-ray Director's Cut. The Unloved, Part 17: "The Moth Diaries" Scout Tafoya Scout Tafoy a's v ideo series continues with a look at Mary Harron's "The Moth Diaries". POPULAR REVIEWS converted by Web2PDFConvert.com Avengers: Age of Ultron Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck converted by Web2PDFConvert.com Hot Pursuit Little Boy Reveal Comments THE AGE OF ADALINE (2015) Cast Blake Lively as Adaline Bowman Michiel Huisman as Ellis Jones Ellen Burstyn as Flemming Harrison Ford as William Jones Amanda Crew as Kiki Richard Harmon as Tony Director Lee Toland Krieger Screenplay J. Mills Goodloe Salvador Paskowitz Original Music Composer Rob Simonsen Cinematography David Lanzenberg Drama, Romance Rated PG-13 for a suggestive comment 110 minutes A D V E R T I S E M E N T converted by Web2PDFConvert.com SUBSCRIBE TO OUR MAILING LIST Enter Your Email Address Subscribe A D V E R T I S E M E N T The Ebert Club is our hand-picked selection of content for Ebert fans. You will receive a weekly newsletter full of movie-related tidbits, articles, trailers, even the occasional streamable movie. 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