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'Age of Adaline': Conventional romance wrapped in weak metaphysics

It's clear Blake Lively has star power - just get a gander at her as beautiful, manipulative Serena van der Woodsen on the small-screen hit Gossip Girl.

Ellis Jones (Michiel Huisman) and Adaline Bowman (Blake Lively) in "The Age of Adaline." (Diyah Pera/Lionsgate Films and Lakeshore Entertainment)
Ellis Jones (Michiel Huisman) and Adaline Bowman (Blake Lively) in "The Age of Adaline." (Diyah Pera/Lionsgate Films and Lakeshore Entertainment)Read more

It's clear Blake Lively has star power - just get a gander at her as beautiful, manipulative Serena van der Woodsen on the small-screen hit Gossip Girl.

Lively, who made her big-screen debut at 17 in 2005's The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (a small role in the 1998 kids pic Sandman hardly counts), also is working slowly, steadily, and with clear determination to develop as a serious actor.

The Age of Adaline - as serious, artsy, and literate as a Hollywood film gets - has afforded Lively the chance to shine for the first time as the lead. She gives the best performance of her career in the title role as a woman who was born in 1908, but who hasn't aged a day since she was 29.

Sadly, director Lee Toland Krieger's offering, a weak wanna-be Jean Cocteau-esque fable with magical realist pretensions, does great disservice to Lively and her remarkably accomplished costars, including Harrison Ford, Ellen Burstyn, and Kathy Baker.

Lively exudes an air of regal elegance as Adaline, a solitary and melancholy 107-year-old woman who for 80 years has been saddled with the exquisite visage and physique of a young woman.

In a ludicrous bit of exposition, we learn that Adaline died in a car accident but somehow came back to the land of the living. The process shut down her capacity to age.

So, will she ever die? Or is she, like, immortal? Can she be shot dead, or will she self-resurrect? Can she fly?

Though Krieger's film promises to deliver metaphysical depth - like, say, Francis Ford Coppola's version of Mircea Eliade's Youth Without Youth or David Fincher's adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - it fails to pursue any of the fascinating questions its premise raises. Instead, it dives headfirst into Nicholas Sparks territory and explores, though not without some charm, Adaline's romantic life.

Krieger has chops when it comes to love stories; his 2012 rom-com Celeste and Jesse Forever was a wonderful film. But here, he flounders.

Set mostly in the present and enhanced with a seriously annoying voice-over narrator (Hugh Ross), The Age of Adaline uses flashbacks to clue us in to the source of Adaline's inability to engage in life with any real passion.

Terrified that her secret might be discovered, she has assiduously avoided forming lasting friendships or making any commitments. Her only real relationships are with her aging daughter (Ellen Burstyn) and a blind pianist (Lynda Boyd).

That all changes when she meets Ellis Jones (Game of Thrones' Michiel Huisman), a charming and awfully rich man who becomes obsessed with her and reawakens in her the capacity to love ( sigh ).

Things go pear-shaped when Ellis takes his new lady friend to meet his parents (Ford and Baker). Because, as it turns out, Ellis' dad met Adaline some years in the past.

The Age of Adaline has some terrific photography and its flashbacks are well-executed (though, I admit, I kept expecting Adaline to meet Forrest Gump as she cruised the decades). And though Lively's restrained performance saves it from becoming too saccharine, the film promises magic but gives us little more than a conventional romance.

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