The Age of Adaline (2015)
Directed by Lee Toland Krieger
After 29-year-old Adaline recovers from a nearly lethal accident, she inexplicably stops growing older. As the years stretch on and on, Adaline keeps her secret to herself until she meets a man who changes her life.
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26 films that influenced The Age of Adaline
What critics say influenced The Age of Adaline
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.
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.
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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.”
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 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.”
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.
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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.