Hollywood long ago ceded "love that stands the test of time" to the realm of science fiction and fantasy, so "The Age of Adaline" falls neatly into a genre that includes "The Time Traveler's Wife," "About Time" and even "Somewhere in Time."
But building this film around all the willowy, world-weary grace that Blake Lively can muster pays off. As a twenty-something who stopped aging 80 years ago, Lively suggests several lifetimes of experience in a love story that ranges from wistful to hopeful, a romance whose female half understands its consequences.
A pedantic narrator introduces Adaline under "her current alias," Jenny, on New Year's Eve 2014, then backtracks to give a quasi-scientific explanation to the aging that stopped after an icy car wreck in the early 1930s.
Widowed with a child, she begins to draw attention for her agelessness from law enforcement (in the paranoid McCarthy era). We watch her go underground — changing names, changing jobs, investing her money in long-shot stocks so that she's never pressed for cash.
Now she works in the San Francisco city archives, and she and her retirement-age daughter (a sparkling Ellen Burstyn) are the only ones who know her secret.
Then a rich do-gooder of a suitor, Ellis (Michiel Huisman), fixes his eye on her. And her many polite rebuffs fail to deter him. Reluctantly, she falls for him.
The script cleverly has Adaline/Jenny catch herself, blowing off a come-on as something she first heard "from a young Bing Crosby … type."
Then Ellis gets a line that works. He quotes Leigh Hunt's poem "Jenny Kiss'd Me."
