The Age of Adaline

The Age of Adaline arrives as a period-appropriate romance for 2015, untouched by the progressive social consciousness that would come to define contemporary cinema. Blake Lively plays Adaline Bowman, a woman frozen at age twenty-nine by a mysterious accident, and the film treats this condition as a romantic metaphor rather than a vehicle for social commentary. The narrative concerns itself solely with matters of the heart: whether Adaline can maintain her secret, whether she can love without revealing her true nature, whether sacrifice and vulnerability might be worth the risk. These are legitimate emotional concerns, but they exist in a vacuum of social awareness.

The film's casting reflects the Hollywood of its era, which is to say it reflects the Hollywood that existed before studios began calculating representation percentages and diversity metrics. The supporting cast includes Ellen Burstyn as Adaline's aging mother and Harrison Ford as Ellis's father, both lending gravitas to what is essentially a three-hanky romantic drama. The cinematography is lovely. The performances are competent. Director Lee Toland Krieger orchestrates the material with the professionalism of a craftsman who understands the contours of the romance genre. Yet there is nothing here that speaks to the social preoccupations of our moment. The film does not interrogate beauty standards, does not grapple with representation, does not deploy its immortal female protagonist as a lens through which to examine power or gender. She is simply a woman who loves and suffers and must choose between revealing herself or remaining alone.

This is not a failing of the film so much as a temporal accident. The Age of Adaline is a work that arrived at the tail end of the old Hollywood order, before cultural criticism became the default mode of entertainment discourse. It asks us to care about Adaline's dilemma without first insisting that we interrogate the systems and structures that produce such dilemmas. In an era when every piece of popular media must now justify itself through some framework of social consciousness, this film's innocent indifference to such concerns reads as almost quaint. It simply wants us to believe in love, and it asks nothing more of us than that belief.