Age of Adaline, The
Entry updated 24 August 2026. Tagged: Film.
US film (2015). Sidney Kimmel Entertainment. Directed by Lee Toland Krieger. Written by J Mills Goodloe and Salvador Paskowitz. Cast includes Kathy Baker, Ellen Burstyn, Harrison Ford, Michiel Huisman and Blake Lively. 113 minutes. Colour.
In the 1930s, a young widow named Adaline (Lively) is in a car that falls into a lake and she dies, but a lightning bolt revives her and somehow makes her Immortal. She soon realizes that she cannot maintain her current Identity without people becoming suspicious of her failure to age, so in the manner of other immortals like Jerome Bixby's The Man from Earth (2008), she begins to periodically move and assume a new identity until she again must relocate. She later becomes romantically involved with Ellis Jones (Huisman), but his father William (Ford), who once had a relationship with Adaline, recognizes her and confronts her until she reveals the truth. She characteristically abandons Ellis, but she also contacts her now-elderly daughter (Burstyn) and confesses that she is tired of her lifestyle of constant deception and reinvention. Then another accident results in heart failure, requiring a defibrillator, which triggers a resumption of her aging process, signalled by a grey hair. So she now feels free to settle down with Ellis.
This film first demonstrates its fidelity to sf with narration deploying a remarkable amount of scientific gobbledegook to explain Adaline's immortality, indicating that the process of her accidental immortality might be discovered in 2035 and become an everyday procedure, though this idea is not further explored. But the film's major point is that immortality is not inherently awful, but becomes so because of society's fear of such people and its reluctance to embrace them. Thus, Adaline's life is troubled because she can never have long relationships with anyone and is condemned to a necessarily nomadic lifestyle. Also, although she is obviously an intelligent and capable woman, she never really accomplishes anything, unlike another of Bixby's male immortals, Flint of the Star Trek episode "Requiem for Methuselah" (1969); one could say that this is probably because she did not desire the public attention that would result and would possibly reveal her secret. There are interesting references to astronomy – the film begins and ends with images of Earth from space, and Adaline is responsible for steering William to a career as an astronomer – suggesting that an immortal person would naturally take a cosmic perspective unlike shorter-lived people. Photography is another theme, which is one form of immortality available to everyone, and photographs are repeatedly observed, while one of Adaline's job involves film preservation, yet she is reluctant to have herself photographed. [GW]
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