Lee Toland Krieger
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The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)
Directed by David Fincher
influenced The Age of Adaline (2015)
Plot Themes
Not classic literature, necessarily, but the kind of literary fiction with at least a passing nod at a more established work—in this case, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button.”
The Age of Adaline essentially blends romance and magical realism (in the vein of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Time Traveler’s Wife, etc.), despite how the film makes an ill-advised effort to provide a science-fiction explanation for its protagonist’s unusual condition.
They seem to have been inspired by films like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Meet Joe Black, glossy, melancholy epic weepies about time and mortality.
Movies revolving around time-defying protagonists have bedeviled auteurs as wildly talented as Francis Ford Coppola and David Fincher, whose Youth Without Youth and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, respectively, were career low points.
Comparisons to 2008's " The Curious Case of Benjamin Button " are inevitable, though in this case Adaline appears to be immortal rather than aging backward.
As a portrait of a woman magically caught out of time, The Age of Adaline more than slightly resembles The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and director Krieger further emphasizes that connection by aping David Fincher’s style at virtually every turn.
Alongside aerial views of San Francisco that mirror similar vistas from Zodiac, Krieger employs a bevy of slow, methodical Fincherian zooms, pans and tracking shots, all of them boasting a muted black-yellow-blue color palette seemingly modeled after both Benjamin Button and Gone Girl.
If anything, the more Fincher-ian film Age of Adaline seems inspired by is Zodiac, as the San Francisco Bay Area plays as big a role as either lead (just in a far more inviting light).
A less lofty, though no less charitable comparison might be made with the time-travel romance Somewhere in Time, while Adaline’s sturdy cross-cutting evokes Stanley Donen’s relationship puzzle Two for the Road; there’s even a scene here, surely no coincidence, set around 1967, with Lively driving a black convertible and meeting cute with a young man stranded on the English countryside.
Last Year at Marienbad (1961)
Directed by Alain Resnais
influenced The Age of Adaline (2015)
Visuals
With Adaline as both cipher and constant, the film darts back and forth across eras with a sense of the uncanny; faces and incidents recur in slightly altered form, recalling—theoretically, at least—the unreliable memory of Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad and the more explicit time-cutting of his indelible Je’taime, Je’taime.
But the true inspiration is those old-fashioned romantic fantasies from the 1940s, the kind that used to run on Channel 11 in the middle of the day, classics like “Portrait of Jennie” or “Stairway to Heaven.”
A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
Directed by Emeric Pressburger
influenced The Age of Adaline (2015)
Themes
But the true inspiration is those old-fashioned romantic fantasies from the 1940s, the kind that used to run on Channel 11 in the middle of the day, classics like “Portrait of Jennie” or “Stairway to Heaven.”
Somewhere in Time (1980)
Directed by Jeannot Szwarc
influenced The Age of Adaline (2015)
Visuals Themes
A less lofty, though no less charitable comparison might be made with the time-travel romance Somewhere in Time, while Adaline’s sturdy cross-cutting evokes Stanley Donen’s relationship puzzle Two for the Road; there’s even a scene here, surely no coincidence, set around 1967, with Lively driving a black convertible and meeting cute with a young man stranded on the English countryside.
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.”
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
Directed by Andrew Dominik
influenced The Age of Adaline (2015)
Hugh Ross’s elegant, embittered tones befit the beguilingly scripted voiceover for 2007’s “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.”
Featuring narration by actor Hugh Ross, who served a similar function in "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford," the film at times has a documentary feel to it, as if Kreiger wants us to approach Adaline's miraculous life from an analytical point of view.
This is all explained, sort of, in the most confusing stretch of the film’s frequent, jarringly pseudoscientific voice-over (provided by the grave, clinical Hugh Ross, who also narrated The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford).
Much of the film is explained to us in the rough-but-resonant tones of narrator Hugh Ross , who also served the same function in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford ; it's pretty much intoned, like a fable.
Kazan’s concept is tidy and, in the hands of the directorial team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (Little Miss Sunshine), creates a film that successfully comments on the perils of romantic love.
They seem to have been inspired by films like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Meet Joe Black, glossy, melancholy epic weepies about time and mortality.
There are touches here of Dorian Gray, Benjamin Button, “The Tin Drum,” Orlando and even a bit of X-Men.
Youth Without Youth (2007)
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
influenced The Age of Adaline (2015)
Themes
Movies revolving around time-defying protagonists have bedeviled auteurs as wildly talented as Francis Ford Coppola and David Fincher, whose Youth Without Youth and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, respectively, were career low points.
Oh, she’s human…so of course a young Harrison Ford can charm her (played by Anthony Ingruber, an uncanny resembler of Ford from his “American Graffiti” days), but usually it’s a life of solitude and loneliness.
While it doesn’t join the company of classic melodramatic weepers it hopes to emulate (think The Notebook to All That Heaven Allows), Age of Adaline is a notch above the predictable, underwritten pap that passes for movie romances today.
This form of age reversal isn't exactly new to Burstyn — just last year, she briefly appeared as Matthew McConaughney's kid in Interstellar — but it's still startling to hear her refer to Lively as "Mom."
The irreplaceable Ellen Burstyn (2014's " Interstellar ") deserves mentioning, too, touchingly portraying Lively's daughter, Flemming, and somehow, some way making it entirely believable.
Changing her identity and moving every decade, telling no one but her elderly daughter Flemming (Ellen Burstyn, Interstellar), Adaline has never committed to living.
When she meets her daughter Flemming for a birthday lunch, we're treated to a senior citizen calling her 'mom,' Ellen Burstyn reprising her aging child/ageless parent "Interstellar" role.
The one person who knows Adaline’s secret is her now-elderly daughter, Flemming (Ellen Burstyn, who played a similar role in “Interstellar”).
Not "An Affair to Remember," mind you, but a welcome change from the Nicholas Sparks brand of mush that has overtaken the hearts-and-flowers corner of movieland.
The script, by Chris Weitz ( About A Boy ) and the schmaltz specialist J. Mills Goodloe ( The Age Of Adaline , The Best Of Me , Everything, Everything ), actually tones down the howling outrageousness of Martin’s novel, which seems to miss the point.
Yes, the film’s script, by Chris Weitz ( About a Boy ) and J. Mills Goodloe ( The Age of Adaline , Everything, Everything ), is based on a novel that is itself extremely what about the heart in its tone; and, yes, if you think too much—the No. 1 rule with a movie like this is never think too much—you will begin to have questions: Why, if you are chartering a tiny prop plane over stormy mountains in the dead of winter on the day before your wedding, wouldn’t you tell your fiancé of your plans?
The Time Traveler's Wife (2009)
Directed by Robert Schwentke
influenced The Age of Adaline (2015)
Themes Plot
It's more in line with "The Time Traveler's Wife" and "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," two other movies that stretched credulity purely for the sake of maudlin sentiment and wistful visuals.
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.”
Much like "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" and "The Time Traveler's Wife," this film asks that we believe in the notion that everyday miracles occur but are overlooked or discarded because of our reliance on logic and adherence to cynicism.
Shades of Twilight’s vampire romance haunt this sweetly soppy fantasy pitched somewhere between the conceit of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button , the literary longing of The Time Traveler’s Wife and the outright silliness of The Lake House .
Romance and aging have been intertwined in movies such as "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," "The Time Traveler's Wife" and "Winter's Tale," not to mention TV's 'The Twilight Zone."
But its ideas about time and aging have been presented more creatively, and logically, in the too-little-seen “Tuck Everlasting.”
Echoing “Groundhog Day” and “Benjamin Button,” “The Age of Adaline” is a romance with an enticing emotional structure.