‘The Age of Adaline’ Trailer: Everyone Gets Older, But Blake Lively Stays the Same Age

At first glance, there’s something a little “female version of ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’” about this trailer for ‘The Age of Adaline’—the film has a fantastical, darkly whimsical quality to its tale of a woman (Blake Lively) who doesn’t age due to a freakish accident. Depending on your perspective, that might be a blessing or a curse, and given our cultural preoccupations with beauty and youth, ‘The Age of Adaline’ looks to explore the beauty in aging itself.

The film follows Lively’s titular Adaline, a woman who will continue to look as though she is always 27 years old while those around her, including her daughter, age and pass away. While this sounds like familiar narrative territory (vampire stories have long explored similar thematic ground), ‘The Age of Adaline’ is looking to get at something a little more poignant. The film comes from Lee Toland Krieger, a director who isn’t talked about often enough. His previous films include the underrated ‘The Vicious Kind’ and, more recently, ‘Celeste and Jesse Forever.’

Krieger discussed ‘The Age of Adaline’ and what he hoped to accomplish with the film with USA Today:

It sounds like wish fulfillment to look like Blake Lively forever. But she cannot grow old with anyone. In a world consumed with youth and vanity, there’s something very fresh and beautiful about a story focusing on the beauty of growing old.

The film also stars Ellen Burstyn as the older version of Adaline’s daughter—Burstyn recently played the older version of Murph in ‘Interstellar,’ which makes this the second time recently that she’ll have out-aged a parent on film. Michiel Huisman of ‘Game of Thrones‘ and ‘Orphan Black‘ plays a man who tries to get Adaline to open up after years of closing herself off, and takes him to meet his parents, played by Harrison Ford and Kathy Baker.

I’ll admit to not being entirely sold on the film based on the trailer, but after discovering that it was directed by Krieger, I’m hugely interested now. He has a very gorgeous dramatic eye, and his previous work has been emotionally involving and sharp. We’ll see if the same rings true for ‘The Age of Adaline’ when it hits theaters on April 24, 2015.