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.”
But building this film around all the willowy, world-weary grace that Blake “Gossip Girl” Lively can muster pays off. As a 20-something who stopped aging 80 years ago, Lively suggests several lifetimes of experience in a love story that ranges from wistful to hopeful, a romance whose female half understands its consequences.
A pedantic narrator introduces Adaline under “her current alias,” Jenny, on New Year’s Eve of 2014, then backtracks to give a quasi-scientific explanation to the aging that stopped after an icy car wreck in the early 1930s. Widowed, we meet her child, see the first attentions her agelessness draws from law enforcement (in the paranoid McCarthy era) and watch her go underground — changing names, changing jobs, investing her money in long-shot stocks so that she’s never pressed for cash.
Now she works in the San Francisco city archives, and she and her retirement-age daughter (a sparkling Ellen Burstyn) are the only ones who know her secret.