There's a special kind of fantasy movie that has a rarefied cinematic value: the kind that doesn't require any special effects but depends solely on the power of the word. A movie in which a person claims to be a ghost, a god, an alien, a robot, anything but the regular person that he or she appears to be. It's the story that veers toward the con—as in "Fallen Angel" and "Nightmare Alley," in which tricksters claim to have actual clairvoyance, or in "The Dead Zone," in which the incredible claim is made honorably—or toward religious faith, as in "Hail Mary," in which a pregnant woman tells her outraged boyfriend, with whom she has refused to have sex, that she hasn't slept with anyone else, either, and is still a virgin, or "Portrait of Jennie," in which a young woman (Jennifer Jones), reported to be long dead, appears to an artist (Joseph Cotten) and claims to be living decades in the past.
Now, another Jennie of verbal fantasy takes her place on the screen, in "The Age of Adaline" (opening tomorrow). In this romantic drama, a young, stately, and reserved San Francisco librarian, Jennifer Larson (played by Blake Lively, of "Gossip Girl" fame), meets a suave young tech tycoon, Ellis Jones (Michiel Huisman). She likes him, but, against her better judgment, begins a relationship with him while keeping a secret that viewers already know.
Born in San Francisco in 1908 as Adaline Bowman, she suffered, in quick and serendipitous succession, in 1937, a car accident and a lightning strike that did something odd to her cellular structure, rendering her unable to age. Twenty-nine forever, Adaline, a widowed mother, is soon taken for her daughter's sister. Her youthful appearance clashes with her official documents, and, under suspicion, she flees the country. Eventually changing her identity, she ultimately returns to San Francisco as Jennie and reconciles herself to a lonely life, comforted only by her relationship with her daughter, Flemming (Ellen Burstyn), now an octogenarian who appears to be Jennie's own grandmother.
Seeing Flemming endure the infirmities of age from which she herself is spared, and knowing that she is doomed to outlive her daughter—as well as anyone she may ever meet—Jennie suffers the terrible torment of her immortality. If ever she were to marry, she would know from the start that (to tweak the title of Maurice Pialat's film) they won't grow old together, and, between her fear of exposure and her horror at watching those she loves deteriorate, Jennie confronts an awful and eternal solitude.
There are many more twists and turns in the story's elaborate exposition and Jennie's complex backstory, and it takes what seems like more than half the movie's hundred and ten minutes to get to the mainspring of the plot. Jennie and Ellis are in love, but Jennie knows that, if she gets involved with him, she risks putting herself into situations that will reveal her unique condition—and that's exactly what happens, in a way that delivers a strong and satisfying, if imprecise, melodramatic kick.
In "Interstellar," Matthew McConaughey saved humanity by stepping through a wormhole that compressed years into hours and left him cursed to miss his young daughter's whole life—the movie's final tug finds him, still vigorously middle-aged, visiting her as an elderly woman on her deathbed. But his character makes a conscious choice and sacrifice in the interest of a collective purpose; Jennie is the beneficiary and victim of a cosmic accident (albeit one that the script explains scientifically), winning a sort of lottery for a long-sought miracle that turns out to be a poisoned prize. (There's also a great opera on this subject, Leoš Janácek's "The Makropoulos Case," from 1925, which had its Metropolitan Opera première in 1996, a tragic and infuriating night, which I wrote about here.)
In other words, the director of "The Age of Adaline," Lee Toland Krieger, has gotten hold of a live wire, thanks to the screenwriters J. Mills Goodloe and Salvador Paskowitz. The story has a deep pedigree and a built-in pathos; its intimate pain is inscribed on a mighty panorama of time, its doomed romanticism is anchored in quasi-universal domestic practicalities. In short, it has everything that should make it an enduring film, except for its writing and its direction. It's an awe-inspiring case of ingredients spoiled in the preparation.
Goodloe and Paskowitz work very hard to make the details of the intricate story mesh. The practicalities that go into disappearing and reappearing, into slipping out of one existence and into another, all the while keeping enough of a toehold at home, are sketched lightly—too lightly; their labors appear to have gone into keeping that complex mechanism functioning, and their vision of romantic connection is a grab bag of comfortable clichés. They and Krieger do virtually nothing with the weight of knowledge that Jennie/Adaline, with her youthful bearing, has accumulated. Her century of experience hardly seems to have marked her at all (except that she's very good at Trivial Pursuit). It's exactly the opposite of David Fincher's passionately realized fascination with history and trauma in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," a fantasy of time-distortion that's the opposite of "Adaline" in another way, too—its extreme dependence on special effects to conjure its impossible vision.
The twist is too good to spoil, but Krieger and the writers skim through it as they skim through the rest of the story. The direction is uniformly creamy, lacking the stilled fury and terrifying resonance of the empty eternity that the story depends on, devoid of the frustrated longing and existential horror that Jennie bears. But the casting of Lively in the lead role is the film's one enduring merit. Like many films, "The Age of Adaline" seems to have been made mainly to reconfigure an actor's career. I hope it works, because Lively displays a melodramatic aptitude that meshes perfectly with the story's inspiration.
Lively's main trait is a lofty bearing that conveys a mild boredom, a distracted air of superiority that suggests that she places herself a little bit above the rest. In "Adaline," her role is that of a perpetual outsider who lives on a higher plane and can't quite come down to Earth. Lively's ingenuously unnatural tone risks seeming dismissive, like an indifference to knowledge. The movie's setup instantly lends her built-in distance an extra dimension, of resistance to painful knowledge, as well as empathy, in providing a substantial and conflict-riddled core for her standoffishness. "The Age of Adaline" should go far to establish her as a powerful big-screen presence. If the movie itself were better, it might have reëstablished melodrama, even more than fantasy, as a timely mode of auteurial invention.
Melodrama runs on a contrast that borders on absurdity—the grandeur of passions arising in ordinary circumstances involving everyday people. It's tragedy domesticated, which lends it an air of comedy. The test of melodramatic power is when audiences have trouble suppressing laughter at inappropriate moments; its virtue is its wondrous absurdity. That's also why melodrama plays a special role in democratic culture: that sense of happiness arising from amazing coincidences veering toward blithe miracles is the magnanimous counterpart to assertions of triumph through the exertions of iron will. Melodrama is a secular version of counting one's blessings, and it's easy to see how Lively's own talents, with her proud tone of deserved good fortune, could be employed in the tragic mode of a bold person getting her comeuppance. I hope that directors of greater imagination and vision than Krieger take the hint of "Adaline." Lively is a host of characters awaiting their creation.
