Adaline Bowman has lived through four centuries and never aged past twenty-seven. That is the premise of The Age of Adaline, a 2015 romantic drama starring Blake Lively as a woman who stopped aging in 1908 after surviving a shipwreck. The film asks a simple question: what happens when you can never grow old? The answer, unfortunately, is not much.
Director Lee Toland Krieger and writer Jamie Babbit build their movie around Adaline’s immortality, but they treat it less as a curse than as a series of costume changes. Blake Lively plays Adaline at multiple points across her life, and the film attempts to show how she navigates love, loss, and the passage of time while remaining physically frozen. What results is a film that is visually striking but narratively thin, a romance that never quite earns its emotional stakes.
Trailer, via Lionsgate Movies.
The Premise Explained
Adaline survives a shipwreck in 1908, and from that moment onward, she stops aging. She looks forever twenty-seven, though her mind ages normally. The film opens with Adaline as a young woman in San Francisco, then jumps forward to her middle age in New York, and finally to her present day in Seattle. At each stage, she falls in love, loses someone, and moves on, always carrying the same youthful face into a new city.
The setup is elegant. Immortality should be tragic, isolating, and endlessly fascinating. Instead, the film treats it as a series of romantic complications, and those complications feel more like plot mechanics than genuine human dilemmas.
Blake Lively’s Performance
Blake Lively carries the film, and she does so with considerable skill. She plays Adaline across three distinct decades, and she manages to convey the character’s internal continuity even as her external circumstances shift dramatically. Her performance is the strongest element of The Age of Adaline, and it is the reason the film holds together at all.
But Lively’s talent is wasted on a script that offers her little more than a series of sad faces and repeated dialogue about loss. The film is also marred by the decision to cast Michiel Huisman as Ellis Jones, Adaline’s love interest in her present day. His performance is stiff, and his chemistry with Lively never clicks.
Love Across the Centuries
The Age of Adaline is a love story, but it never explains why Adaline’s immortality makes her relationships meaningful. She loses lovers and children, and she watches the world change around her, but the film never explores what it means to love someone who will never age. Instead, it settles for a conventional romance that could exist in any other film.
The film also suffers from a lack of urgency. Adaline’s condition is a curse, and the film rarely shows what that curse actually entails. She is not visibly lonely, and she does not seem particularly sad. She simply moves through life, changing cities and partners, without ever stopping to reflect on what her condition truly costs her.
The Look of the Film
Where The Age of Adaline succeeds is in its visual style. The film is shot beautifully, with sweeping cityscapes and intimate close-ups that capture the texture of Adaline’s skin. The production design is meticulous, and the film takes care to show how San Francisco, New York, and Seattle look in different eras. These are the moments where the film feels alive, even when the story beneath them is not.
The score, composed by James Newton Howard, complements the visuals with a lush, emotional sound that tries to compensate for the film’s narrative weaknesses. It works in the background, but it cannot save the story from its own structural problems.
How It Ends
The film’s climax revolves around a cure for Adaline’s condition, and the ending attempts to resolve both her immortality and her romantic arc. Without spoiling too much, the resolution is tidy in a way that feels unsatisfying. The film has spent its runtime building toward a moment of transformation, but when that moment arrives, it feels more like a relief than a revelation.
The ending also raises questions about the nature of Adaline’s existence. If she can be cured, then what was the point of her immortality? The film does not answer this question, and its silence leaves a lasting sense of emptiness.
Final Word
The Age of Adaline is a film with a great idea and a poor execution. It is visually beautiful, and it features a strong lead performance from Blake Lively, but its script fails to deliver on the emotional weight of its premise. The romance is conventional, the pacing is slow, and the ending feels unsatisfying. The film is ultimately a disappointment, a story that could have been profound but chose to be safe instead.
Key Facts
– Title: The Age of Adaline
– Director: Lee Toland Krieger
– Writer: Jamie Babbit
– Lead actress: Blake Lively
– Release year: 2015
– Running time: 106 minutes
Critical Score: 5.1 out of 10
- Blake Lively delivers a strong, committed performance across multiple decades.
- The film is visually striking, with beautiful cinematography and production design.
- The romance lacks urgency and feels conventional.
- The ending resolves the central conflict without answering the film’s core questions.
- The script fails to explore what Adaline’s immortality truly means.
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