The Age of Adaline

Lee Toland Krieger’s 2015 romance follows Adaline, who stops ageing after a car accident and spends eight decades swapping identities to protect the secret. The film’s central gamble is a casting one. The man Adaline loved in the 1960s and the man who turns up in the present are played by two actors: Harrison Ford now, Anthony Ingruber then. Ingruber arrived from the internet: his impressions of Ford and his resemblance to him helped win him the part, and he had been posting Han Solo videos since 2008. The last act therefore rests on an impersonation rather than digital de-ageing, and it collapses if you do not buy the face. The rules are fixed early. A narrator explains the immortality with invented physics tied to a named date and a particular crash, which is the opposite of leaving a fantasy alone. The period work goes past wardrobe. The picture was shot on anamorphic lenses with almost no steadicam, imitating the look of studio romances from the 1930s to the 1950s, and the costumes came from Oscar winner Angus Strathie. A good fit if you want the past marked off by anamorphic lenses and an absent steadicam, not by costume alone. Not for viewers who want the fantasy left unexplained: the mechanics are recited in the opening minutes and never reopened.