Finally: a movie that digs into the grand woe and emotional strife of being forever doomed to look like Blake Lively – and with the comfortably glamorous lifestyle and collection of clothes hanging in the closet to match.

Yes, at first blush, the romance drama "The Age of Adaline" is plenty ridiculous, and that’s before the movie starts elaborating on the resurrecting powers of California snow and electricity oxygenizing human telomeres that does … something, I don’t know. And yet, despite its inherent wack-a-doodle silliness – and then some – there’s something oddly charming and watchable about director Lee Toland Krieger’s majestic swooning storybook melodrama, playing like an equally pretty if mouth-breathing cousin to "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button." There are worse things (aka most things associated with the Nicholas Sparks factory).

Lively plays Adaline Bowman, just your average turn of the 20th century gal living it up in San Francisco when, one peculiar snowy evening, she crashes her car into a creek. As the narrator notes, the cold water mixes with a lightning strike, causing a type of molecular regeneration elaborated upon in a thermonuclear-physics law won’t be discovered until 2035 which … long story short, she never ages. If your first thought is "Woo hoo!", you’re not Adaline Bowman, who doesn’t seem particularly enthused about the whole perpetually a twenty-something business. Instead, after a mildly pesky neighbor and some Communist-hunting FBI agents begin asking around, she’s scared into hiding.

Cut to today, and Adaline still looks the same and still hides unassumingly in plain sight, moving every few years with a new identity. She works at a Bay Area library and is friends only with her now elderly daughter (Ellen Burstyn) and a blind pianist. At a swanky New Year’s Eve party, however, she meets Ellis (Michiel Huisman, "Game of Thrones"), who charms, goads, horribly jokes and kinda sorta blackmails his way into a date – and past her time-tested emotional defenses.

One doesn’t need to push too hard into "The Age of Adaline" to poke perplexing logic holes in its age-defying saga. Adaline may not age, but does that also stop her from contracting heart disease, cancer or any other non-natural cause of death? If she gets into a car accident and gets launched from the car, does she not also suffer internal bleeding or other life-threatening injuries? Because, apparently not.

And that’s not including the times when the screenplay from J. Mills Goodloe and Salvador Paskowitz occasionally confuses agelessness with being a genius savant, magically predicting the economic viability of the Xerox company back in the ’40s, prattling off Ted Williams’ career stats without hesitation and remembering minor events from 60 years in the past for a game of Trivial Pursuit. I can’t even remember what happened last week.

Handled right, these little logic questions wouldn’t be an issue, but the script refuses to let the magic simply be magic – especially the comically unnecessary voiceover. When it’s not pattering on and on about already established details, it’s taking bizarre detours to elaborate on the climatic impact of a meteor hitting the surface of the moon causing monsoons in Papua New Guinea – a weak echo of the "everything is connected" car accident segment from "Benjamin Button" – and how agelessness was caused by ribonucleic acid compounds or some silly jargon my brain instantly rejected. Not only are all of these bits delivered with the overly verbose vocab of a grad student trying to impress the professor, but the story’s logic gaffes would be much easier to look past if the movie didn’t insist on explaining itself all the time.

The stiff voiceover just impedes the really impressive visual work from Krieger (previously behind the Rashida Jones/Andy Samberg indie dramedy "Celeste and Jesse Forever") and cinematographer David Lanzenberg. I mean, if you’re going to borrow the storybook tone from "Benjamin Button," you might as well swindle its grandiose visuals too – all the more so since Krieger does a pretty killer David Fincher impression.

He fills the Bay Area of "The Age of Adaline" with luxuriously rich images carved from deep shades of mahogany, vast aerial shots (even from space!) and some simply swoon-worthy visuals – like a car resting in front of a fake starry sky or a lightning strike slowly growing through the frosty air. It’s easy to get lost in the sumptuousness, and when "The Age of Adaline" pulls off its lavish fable vibe, it’s mostly a result of Krieger’s seductive visual panache.  

It’s certainly not the script or the story, which unfortunately tends to let the director down. Goodloe and Paskowitz spend too much time in the front half of the story, taking a long time to establish Adaline’s scenario (cue the voiceover!) and lingering on her and Ellis’ meet-cute and tenuous first romantic steps. It’s charming enough; Huisman is affable – if overly enthusiastic – and Burstyn adds a bright, sweet pop in her few scenes. For a story about essentially an immortal woman, however, it feels like the most mundane path for "The Age of Adaline" to take.

Lively tries to give her character some life – and it goes without saying she wears the hell out of Adaline’s retro-glamour closet – but as written, Adaline Bowman is just kind of a bore, man. Her reaction gives little sense of the actual wonder and potential of her situation, and the reasoning for going into fearful seclusion is flimsy (you never know when the FBI will begin the hunt for time-traveling Commies again). The result makes her performance just seem like she’s putting on a wise, lived-in voice.

The story hits more compellingly melodramatic material in its final stretch, when Adaline discovers Ellis’ father (Harrison Ford) is a former lover from the ’70s who she fled when things got too serious. There’s a lot of complicated emotions at play here – reconnecting with the one that got away, regret and coping with it after life has moved on, not to mention the awkwardness of knowing father and son both likely slept with the same woman. By this time, though, there’s not much time left, causing the movie to clumsily rush through such a bizarre situation and the complex emotions involved.

Thanks to Krieger and Lanzenberg, "The Age of Adaline" never loses its unrepentant and sincerely epic romanticism. The rich direction draws you in and keeps you involved, but the story doesn’t have the grandly profound emotional impact to match its grandly profound cosmic aspirations. Even with all of the warmly captured browns and shadows and swooning love, the end result, like Adaline herself, is beautiful if chilly.

Combine all that with the dopily scientific voiceover, and "The Age of Adaline" feels like a fairy tale – an incredibly pretty one at that – told like a lab report.