Christian Movie Review: The Age of Adaline

Plot Details: This Review Reveals Minor Details About the Plot.

You haven't aged a day!

Plot Overview

Jennifer Larsen (Blake Lively) née Adaline Marie Bowman (“My friends call me Della”) was born Jan. 1, 1908 at Children's Hospital, S.F. At the age of 29, she was driving down a country road during a freak snowstorm when her car went off the road into the river. She passed out, her body suffered anoxic reflex, and her core temperature decreased to 87° F. Then she was struck by lightning which: blew her out of the water, defibrillated her heart jolting her back to life, and curiously affected her metabolism and cell behavior halting her aging process. She could find no scientific explanation, so she has to live with it preferably out of the limelight. She is about to change her name again—to Susan Fleischer—and her appearance and her residence. But first she goes to a 2015 New Year's Eve celebration, also her secret 107th birthday. There she is hit on by a young man Ellis Jones (Michiel Huisman.) A voice-over tells us this is the “first and last chapter of her story.”

What follows is slow and stately preliminary dating relations. Instead of the middle stages of courtship, though, they just hop into bed together, she having evidently once learned this "modern" behavior from GI's about to ship out to some European war. The final stage involving commitment she is unable to make … unless Ellis's aged father William (Harrison Ford) is able to persuade her to open up to life.

The good news is along the lines of the song, “I Want a Girl Just Like the Girl That Married Dear Old Dad.” Jennifer so reminds William of the kind of girl he'd have wanted to marry when he was younger that he approves wholeheartedly of her for his son, so much that his wife gets jealous. The bad news is that it would be one twisted arrangement, something along the lines of the country song, “I Am My Own Grandpa.” In that song, you may recall, a country boy marries a widow, and his father marries the widow's daughter. In sorting out his various relations, the country boy realizes that since his stepdaughter is also his stepmother, he must be his own grandpa. If there is any resolution to Della's time anomaly, it will probably twist back in on itself in some way. She's tired of having to lie to honest people. It's enough to give a woman gray hair, except she can't get gray hair.

Ideology

It was an erudite courtship where boy and girl exchanged poetry (and poetry books), played word games, and spoke foreign languages. Such being the case, I want to look at the title, play with it, see if there's some clue to the movie in it. From The Age of Adaline, I take out the minor words to get Age Adaline. Then I split the second word into two: Age Ad Aline, to make three words. Then I shift around the words to get: Adage Aline. Okay.

The couple share an admittedly stupid joke about a horse that tries out for baseball. It can aline the bat to hit the ball just fine. It can pick up the line drives as shortstop. Its pitching ability is given in an adage. So all we have to do is line up the adages in the movie to see what it's about. Okay.

“The Age of Adaline” opens with a shot of the Earth from outer space zooming down to California, the setting of the movie. Right away we understand we're on a round Earth. The movie moves quickly to Adaline picking up her new fake ID cards: flat pieces of plastic. What's flat is phony. It's a well known adage to accuse someone of believing in a flat Earth to mean he's unscientific in his thinking about the world. Oh, goody! I love this kind of movie.

Ellis first saw “Jenny” when she was reading nursery rhymes in braille. Nursery rhymes are de facto adages in their own right. Let's try to find one. In this movie a physicist/astronomer has an Aha! moment as he shoes a ladybug from Jenny's hair and it goes flying off. The associated nursery rhyme I recall is:

Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home.
Your house is on fire, your children will burn.

How might a scientist look at this rhyme in a way the rest of us are blind to? Well, a ladybug is an almost perfect hemisphere, and perched there in a woman's hair in place of a hairpin or bauble, it would appear to a physicist or astronomer like a miniature globe. Her children are cooking in a fire: global warmings of a future generation. The walls on fire of the house would represent the cause of the warming in the enveloping layer of her home. That the ladybug must fly home means there's air for her to fly through. It's the greenhouse effect causing global warming, the transparent walls of a greenhouse stopping the convection of air that would cool down the plants growing on the flat floor in this (unscientific) representation of Earth's climate change.

Another way to look at it was when I was riding home from the movie on the express bus. The bus was hot because it was crowded and the windows didn't open. The bus was a tube hurtling down the street in the express lane, and those closed windows let in the light but not the breeze from the air flowing by. The Earth is a globe, not a cylinder, but at least we're not talking about a pie pan shape. As it hurtles through space, the greenhouse gases in the upper atmosphere prevent that cool passing breeze getting in. Wrong! There is no breeze from outer space; space is a vacuum. Leading climate researcher Alan Siddons states in a chapter of “A Long List of Misconceptions” that: In reality, greenhouses merely suppress convective heating loss, preventing the heated air from dissipating. It is air that's trapped, not radiation; glass's response to infrared (IR) has nothing to do with it …—it does not constitute a radiative barrier (63).

Now we've got to align ladybug with other adages. In the movie a saying is given in Italian then translated into English: “Years, lovers, and glasses of wine: these are things that should never be counted.” Our world has been around for years past counting. Just as a series of lovers will prove to be some hotter and some colder, so our planet has experienced the embrace of various climates over its time. Environmental consultant Prof. Timothy Ball, PhD in an “Analysis of Climate Alarm, Part 2” mentions: hundreds of research papers from a variety of sources confirming the existence of a period warmer than today known as the Medieval Warm Period (MWP). This period was clearly warmer than present temperatures (129). There have also been ice ages. Wine comes from grapes grown seasonally. Some years are better than others. Some climate experiences likewise.

Jennifer (Susan) is told by her forger that it's the little blemishes that make his work look authentic, and she replies, “Nice work,” but adds the adage, “Don't get sloppy. It's the little things that trip you up.” The sun has little blemishes, too, as it were, called sunspots that follow an eleven year cycle, close to the decade period Adaline gives herself before changing her identity. There was even a period known as the Maunder Minimum, from 1645–1715 of a quiescent sun when there were NO sunspots. History reveals something very peculiar about that time. Without the solar wind in conjunction with a strong terrestrial magnetic field to deflect cosmic rays coming from space, those rays penetrated the atmosphere causing high altitude ionization producing an abundance of aerosols that served as the nuclei of condensation for cloud formation. Clouds thus formed are brighter and longer-lived than regular clouds. That increased Earth's albedo, the coefficient of reflection, sending more energy back into space than usual. So during the period of the Maunder Minimum, rivers froze over that should have been flowing, etc. They call it the Little Ice Age. There was a similar Dalton minimum and cooling period in 1795. Comparing the graphs, the next minimum ought to be along—brace yourself—in 2031. You can look at the graphs yourself at:

http://iceagenow.info/2012/02/sunspot-cycle-chart-shows-strong-cooling/

In this movie it was a collision of a giant space rock with the moon that produced an exceptionally high tide in Tierra del Fuego that in turned spawned a snow storm in Marin County, Calif. furthering the plot. The Good Book tells us, (Gen. 1:16) “God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night.” In the movie the moon rules. The sun, however is the greater ruler. Adaline could only find peace if she'd be able to enjoy a normal aging process. Maybe God wants our planet to age along certain lines. Maybe the ladybug is better advised to continue its business as usual foraging for food rather than panicking about its burning house heating up future generations. The cars in this movie speed, go off the road, crash into each other, and trap its rider, but going into the stream does not raise the creek level. It's a matter of scale. It is unlikely the internal combustion engine is going to raise the level of our oceans.

Production Values

This film “” (2015) was directed by Lee Toland Krieger. Its screenplay was written by J. Mills Goodloe & Salvador Paskowitz. It stars Blake Lively, Michiel Huisman, and Harrison Ford. Lively nailed it as a centenarian in a young woman's body, but credit has to be shared with script, sets, costumes, and directing. She was very believable. Excellent supporting performances were given by Harrison Ford and Ellen Burstyn.

MPAA rated it PG–13 for a suggestive comment. A gentle pervasive music, such as Mr. Blue Sky (Written and Performed by Jeff Lynne), strongly evoked a quieter settled pace of a bygone era. It would have been easy for a movie such as this one to miss the period mark, but what must have been punctilious attention to detail assured that it didn't.

Review Conclusion w/ Christian Recommendation

This is a movie of moderation, that is it doesn't get carried away with extreme emotion, overmuch drama, or weird science. The Sci-Fi aspect is not belabored, but it does tie in cosmic forces with Earthly happenings. I loved the physicist/astronomer character playing into the plot, but then my physics background from my engineering degree would have disposed me to appreciate a higher level of science than usually found in chick flicks. This might make a good date movie because of its diversity of appeal.

Movie Ratings

Action factor: Decent action scenes. Suitability for Children: Suitable for children 13+ years. Video Occasion: Good Date Movie. Special effects: Well done special effects. Suspense: A few suspenseful moments. Overall product rating: Five stars out of five.