The Age of Adaline

**1/2 out of ****

The Age of Adaline is a romantic fantasy, where the beautiful title character (Blake Lively) has a secret: She hasn’t aged a day since a bizarre accident in 1930s. After her condition attracted the interest of government agents in the fifties, Adaline went into hiding, beginning a process of starting anew every decade – only informing her aging daughter (Ellen Burstyn) as to her identity and whereabouts. 

Adaline makes friends carefully, and doesn’t make strong emotional attachments. Every romance has resulted in her heartbreaking decision to move on, unwilling to risk the possibility of her condition being rediscovered by curious authorities. In present-day San Francisco, she has just met a wonderful man (Michiel Huisman) for whom she gradually falls –with resistance. Once again torn between keeping a secret and having love in her life, she makes a discovery about the young man, which re-opens an old chapter of her past.

A good chunk of the film finds itself taking place at a weekend visit to a house in the woods of the Pacific Northwest, involving a performance by Harrison Ford, which is so surprisingly emotional, I found myself wishing the entire story had been told from his perspective.

Director Lee Toland Krieger creates a generally pleasant tone with his cinematographer, David Lanzenberg, who captures vistas gorgeously. Blake Lively also does wonders working with such a vaguely defined character, bringing subtle hints of a troubled old soul beneath a young modern beauty. Sadly, the magical realism concept doesn’t manage to gain much substance.

However, in an attempt to do so, it misfires through the seldom use of third-person voice-over narration, which needlessly tries to justify the magic in the film with pseudo-scientific explanations. I don’t care if it seems like I’m watching “Cosmos.” My eyes are still rolling.

Just as Adaline is torn between love and safety, I’m torn between congratulating a watchable melodrama and scolding it for being so superficial. I happen to love The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, for which The Age of Adaline will surely be compared. Adaline is thankfully shorter, simpler and is not based on any previously written material; but it shortchanges us on the beauty of a journey through life and gives us a pandering story about cosmic forces guiding lovers to one another.

Side Note: Isn’t it unusual that Ellen Burstyn is playing a woman who ages faster than her parent only months after she did the same thing in "Interstellar”?

While We're Young

**** out of ****

Like many independent filmmakers, Noah Baumbach’s film career has typically strayed away from the sensational characteristics associated with the genre he’s working with in any given film. He mostly makes bitter dramas with dry comedy or dry comedies with bitter drama. In his latest film, he re-teams with Ben Stiller, with whom he worked in Greenberg, to make a much more conventional comedy –and it may be my favorite of his films.

Stiller and Naomi Watts play a childless couple in their forties, struggling to relate with the rest of the world, as they’re losing the support of their yuppie peers, who are now parents. Stiller plays a documentary filmmaker, stuck on a project, which is boring and has no end in sight. While teaching at the university, he is approached by a young documentarian (Adam Driver) and his girlfriend (Amanda Seyfried) who express respect for his past work.

A friendship blossoms between the two couples, as the modern ironic hipster trends displayed by the young couple become a new interest for the older couple. What follows is a very funny movie, which functions as a love/hate letter to hipsters from an older generation.

I’ve often been critical of Baumbach for being another New York auteur, who embraces the motto, “write what you know” to an alienating degree. This film may still be aimed at white privileged people, but it has more broad appeal than films he’s made about self-destructive intellectual artists.

A lot of movies have been made about adults who think they’re “cool” –until they wake up on that dreadful day when a younger generation has redefined the word again. “Neighbors” is said to be a recent example of this, but this movie, possessing a similar rapid-fire humor delivery system, is a little more grounded by focusing on ideas, saving its only overt sight-gag for last. I really enjoyed it.