The Age of Adaline: Directed by Lee Toland Krieger, Starring: Blake Lively,and Harrison Ford.4/26/2015 The Age of Adaline is a film consistently undermining itself. The film has a lot of great elements, but doesn't really explore them enough to make a good movie. Blake Lively and Harrison Ford are pretty great in their performances, but they aren't really given the chance to do anything with their characters. The film at times captures the sentimentality that is obligatory in a story about a person living through time without aging, but it never really goes all out with this, ultimately leading the film to feel somewhat cold. The directing, the way the narrative is done — none of it is particularly bad, just clunky. Again, the film has elements about it that are good. It's just consistently fighting itself. These better elements can mainly be found in the actors,and the direction done here. I've seen these two things elevate a project just as much as ideas, and The Age of Adaline benefits from having people who care back it. Blake Lively, who I actually haven't seen in much else, is compelling as Adaline. The script gives her a lived-in feel that just makes her more interesting, and she's just dreamy enough for the audience to believe that this is a person who, after years of living, has just accepted the fact that life is not something to make a big deal out of. These two things allow Lively to show an impressive amount of range, even if these are just the basis for the character. Harrison Ford was also quite good. He's a person who had a relation with Adaline in the 60's and has grown old as she stayed young. When she suddenly reappears in his life, he starts to lose himself a little as he tries to figure out if it's the same girl. With this role, Ford is given a chance to act the way he did in films like Blade Runner, The Fugitive, and Witness, which is simply saying he's good if anything else. As I mentioned before, Lively and Ford really aren't given time to explore their characters, but they are still trying their best to make them compelling. I also can't quite fault Lee Toland Krieger's direction. The way the film looks is very nice, and you can definitely tell that someone who cared about all this was working. This work invokes a sentimentality in the movie, which is one desperately needing emotion (even though as I've explained it doesn't quite go far enough). But frankly that's not all you need to make a good movie, and where The Age of Adaline stumbles is the narrative. There's a narrator in this of film that I feel is somewhat unnecessary. I've always been one for saying "show don't tell",and every time he started talking I was taken out of the experience for a small bit of time. It’s an aspect of the film that could have easily been erased; at the very least it could have been improved with some simple filmmaking techniques. Another problem I've found is the fact that the movie is just shallow. I feel that Adaline should have a history to her, but the film is simply content on making a conventional love story play out. I wanted this to feel like David Fincher's spectacular The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, but the film is too shallow to feel like an epic story like that one. It's too content to tell as interesting as a story. And it just doesn't. For all the good work put in this movie, the film the story seems inconsequential, and that's one of the worst things you can find in a film. So as far as it all goes, The Age of Adaline is a good movie, but it feels like a lot of good work put into a story that doesn't fully resonate. I would say a waste of talent if the film weren't actually quite as good as it is, but what's there isn't particularly horrid. I give The Age of Adaline a 6 out of 10 Written by Stephen Tronicek, Edited by Mia Rintoul.
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December 2017
CategoriesAuthorHello welcome to FilmAnalyst. My name is Stephen Tronicek, and I really like movies. This is a way to get my opinions out to people. Thank you for visiting. |