“The Age of Adaline” is a 2015 fantasy-infused period romance movie for all ages that was directed by Lee Toland Krieger, who also directed “The Vicious Kind.”
Adaline lives in downtown San Francisco with her dog and keeps a pretty quiet life. But the premise gets more confusing when we remember that Adaline was born on December 31, 1908. She stopped getting older after she was 29, so she has been stuck in her late 20s for eight long decades.
When the charming hero Ellis shows up, strange things start to happen. In the meantime, we learn more about Adaline’s strange case, and she has to make a choice that will change her life. Even though critics and fans had mixed feelings about the movie, Blake Lively and Harrison Ford’s performances make the 2015 movie’s journey exciting. You need to get closer to the end to really understand it, and that’s where we come in. SPOILERS AHEAD.
The Age of Adaline Summary of the Story
The story starts near the end of 2013. Adaline Bowman lives a quiet life with her dog in San Francisco. She goes to a guy Adaline asked to make some fake IDs for her. Adaline thanks the guy, but she is upset with him because she thinks his skills could be used in a better way. She takes a taxi to her home in Chinatown, and then she goes to work. Adaline goes to the room with the records and plays a strange tape on the projector. The projector slowly shows Adaline Bowman’s past. She was the first child born on December 31, 1908. She got married, had a girl, and named her Flemming.
In 1937, when Adaline’s husband died in a terrible accident while building the Golden Gate Bridge, she was very sad. But ten months later, Adaline had an accident of her own. A lightning bolt with 500 million volts of electricity hit her in the lake, and she almost drowned. Adaline’s heart started beating again after two whole minutes, and she became immortal right away. Since then, Adaline has been 29 for a long time, even though she has moved from place to place, used fake names, and learned new languages. Since then, she has been on the run and secretly met his daughter, who keeps getting older at a normal rate. On New Year’s Eve 2014, as Adaline is leaving a party, she meets Ellis Jones in the elevator.
Ellis is friendly and likes to flirt, and Adaline says her name is Jennifer. The guy asks Adaline for her address, but she quickly ends the conversation. She does run into Ellis again, and they start to like each other. Ellis asks Adaline out on a date, and she says yes. But when Adaline’s dog dies, their budding romance is put on hold. After a while, Adaline starts to feel bad for Ellis and agrees to go with him to meet his parents. But she gets a big surprise when she meets Ellis’ father, William. He knows her right away and calls her Adaline. Adaline’s memories start to come back to her as she tries to hide who she really is.
Does Ellis end up with Adaline at the end of The Age of Adaline?
Things heat up at Ellis’s house when William talks about his past with Adaline and says that they were “very close.” Even though the memory hurts his forty-year marriage, it seems like Adaline had a big effect on William’s life. Williams tells his family about how Adaline pushed him to finish his degree. The thing he is most proud of is finding a comet that was supposed to pass by Earth in 1981 but hasn’t yet. Adaline is shocked to find out that William named his comet “Della C. 1981” after her. However, William has told his family that he named the comet after a made-up aunt of Ellis’s named Della. We don’t learn much about Ellis’s sister, but we do learn more about William’s time with Adaline in the past.
William went to England when he was a young man, and that’s where he met Adaline. William fixed Adaline’s car and they hung out for a week. Adaline also liked William, since he was one of the few people who knew her real name. She also hid her face while William took a picture of her with him. At the moment, William looks at the picture and thinks that it looks a lot like him. At the same time, William sees by accident the scar he stitched on Adaline. While Adaline runs away quickly, William realizes that even though mother and daughter look alike, they will never have the same scar. After his realization, William goes after Adaline, which leads to a fight. Adaline also tells William the truth and says she’s sorry.
Adaline always leaves after she finds out something, as she always has. Ellis is shocked to find her letter, but Ellis’s dad, William, tells him to go after Adaline. Adaline, on the other hand, wrecks her car for the second time in her life. The next thing that happens is like the thing that made her immortal, but Adaline does not die. Adaline ends up in the hospital because of Ellis. She tells Ellis everything about her strange case while she is in the hospital bed. Flemming tells Adaline that she is Adaline’s grandmother when she meets her. But Adaline tells her that Ellis knows what’s really going on. Adaline and Ellis end up going on a date. Flemming blesses them, and we think that Ellis and Adaline decide to spend more time together because of this.
How did she stop getting older? Does Adaline Begin Aging Again?
Adaline stopped getting older when she was in a bad accident ten months after her husband died. At the start of the movie, her car falls into a body of water, and at the same time, a lightning bolt with a lot of power hits her. Adaline comes back to life because the shock acts as a defibrillator. Von Mymen’s principle of electron compression in deoxyribonucleic acid, which people will find out about in 2035, stops her from getting older for 80 years. Both the substance and Von Mymen are made up, but Adaline does stop getting older anyway. The costume designer gets to play with clothes from that time, but it doesn’t look good for Adaline. Her daughter, on the other hand, ages much faster than she does.
Some of us may be interested in what will happen to Ellis and Adaline in the end, but it also makes us wonder what will happen to them. If Adaline doesn’t get older and Ellis does, they’re in a tough spot. If Adaline stays immortal, Ellis may age naturally like Flemming, and Adaline may be alone after Ellis dies. But the last scene has another twist, which you might be able to guess if you’ve seen movies where a character is stuck in a time loop or a time flux. The last accident seems to undo what happened before, and Adaline starts getting older again. When the movie’s last scene is shown again after a year, Adaline sees a strand of white hair, which shows that she has aged normally. So, in the end, Adaline starts getting older again.
Who is telling the story?
At the beginning of the movie, a man talks about a woman in a yellow taxi while the camera comes down from the clouds. The narrator knows everything about her because he or she is all-knowing. He may also be the voice of the author, or in other words, the one who decides what will happen to Adaline. If you don’t know, the movie is based on “Amelie,” which tells its story in a similar way. Moreover, the screenwriters were influenced by Alfonso Cuaron‘s 2001 movie ‘Y Tu Mamá También’ and Sidney Lumet’s 1976 movie ‘Network.’ Strangely, the narrator knows more about Adaline’s condition than she does, and she seems to speak from the future. As it makes its myth, the voice is almost in charge of time and wisdom itself. Therefore, the agent is not any character but is practically a divine presence in the movie.
