Blake Lively never gets old in 'Age of Adaline'

BLAKE LIVELY stars in "The Age of Adaline" as a woman who hits 29 and then stops aging.

This is presented in the movie as some kind of huge problem, not only for the unwrinkled Adaline, who watches her young daughter turn in the course of 70 years into Ellen Burstyn, but for Adaline's suitors.

She can't take the emotional pain of falling in love and then watching mates age and die, so she nips all romance in the bud.

Here she might solicit the opinion of the men she avoids, most of whom would probably not mind dying in the arms of a woman who never ages.

And isn't it a good deal for Adaline? Husbands shuffle off, their estates remain, she stays young . . . win-win.

In any event, Adaline has another problem - the FBI wants to take her to Area 51 and dissect her, or something, so she changes identity often and remains as anonymous as she is ageless.

Until at long last she falls deeply in love, and I wish I could report that the man (Michiel Huisman) who draws her out is suitably irresistible.

But, alas, he's the sort of Ultra Sensitive Guy with Beard that woman often get stuck with in movies, solicitous and attentive to the point of emasculation, particularly in his masochistic willingness to absorb multiple rejections.

So their chemistry isn't great, and the movie seems desperately ready to fall into some Nicholas Sparksian abyss.

Then Adaline goes to meet her boyfriend's parents, and they turn out to be far more interesting, as played by Harrison Ford and Kathy Baker. Ford is given much to do here, and has fun with the role.

He and Baker turn a fairly tame two-way relationship movie into a more complex four-character piece. It's just as preposterous, but engagingly so.

And, via Baker and Ford as a couple 40 years into a marriage, much wiser on the subject of actual love.

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