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How does it feel like to stay young forever and never age a day? It should be every woman's dream to stay beautiful forever. Consequently, what happens is you have to watch everyone you love grow old and die, to hurt those you care about, spending most of your time alone and keeps everything only to yourself because you cannot be truly honest about who you are. Would you still want it? The film is essentially a mix of fantasy and bittersweet romance.
The Age of Adaline is a romantic drama that tells the story of one woman, Adaline Bowman who was born in 1908 but stopped aging completely due to a bizarre car accident. In order to prevent herself from being a subject of experimentation, Adaline spent most of her life running and escaping using fake identities, living n different locations and the same solitary existence for sixty years due to her unique condition. She's afraid of falling in love...as Adaline puts it, love and happiness is impossible when there's no growing old together. Without that, love is just heartbreak.
The film tries to show the reality of eternal youth...that immortality can be a curse that makes your life empty, meaningless and devoid of happiness. Adaline lived most of her life running and escaping that she never truly had a life. The film has an intriguing premise but it was never fully explored. The film heavily relies on expository narrative to let the audience understand what is happening throughout the life of Adaline, but never show the price of eternal youth explicitly and this has taken its toll on her, which hurts the film a lot. Many of the plot points aren't fully fleshed out and feels rather underdeveloped. Not to mention, it's difficult to emotionally invest on a character who's young and highly attractive like Blake Lively to begin with...(how is it a sad thing?) Don't tell us, show us more instead.
Furthermore, the love romance between the two leads aren't very convincing either as the on-screen chemistry just not strong enough to let the audience believe that Adaline found a reason to start living again and really learn to let go through Ellis. However, Blake Lively do perform far better in some of the key scenes. The ending is rather disappointing and predictable. It could have been far more interesting if the screenwriters willing to take a step further into the extreme or unknown.
In short, the Age of Adaline is still a decent drama to watch. I just wish that it could explore more of Adaline's best and worst moments of her life to give the viewers an emotional resonance with the film.
Rating:7/10
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I enjoyed Adaline on a personal level, and it left me with more food for thought than I expected.
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