Directed by: Justin Baldoni
Distributed by: Sony Pictures Releasing
Written by Anna Harrison
50/100
Ratings are subjective.
That seems obvious, but it bears repeating for “It Ends with Us.” A 50 for a movie I went into with rock bottom expectations is vastly different from a 50 for, say, a Spielberg movie. If I give a 50 to a film from one of our greatest living directors, things must have gone very, very wrong; if I give a 50 to an adaptation of a Colleen Hoover book widely regarded as trash by those with an ounce of media literacy, things must have gone… pretty well, actually. It’s all relative.
So all of that is to say that “It Ends with Us” was a lot better than I expected, and for that, I’ll give it some credit.
If you were watching Blake Lively’s press tour (and, by extension, the press tour for “Deadpool and Wolverine”), you might think “It Ends with Us” is a fun summer romcom with hot people in hot outfits. You’d be wrong on two of those counts—it’s not a romcom and the outfits are not hot. The people are, but the clothes… my God, the clothes on Blake Lively. They are so bad, and the whole ordeal is made worse because the clothes are from Lively’s own wardrobe. Jenny Slate’s clothes? Also bad. The outfits are so bad that I laughed out loud in some scenes; they felt like a really wealthy person’s idea of what a poor-but-hip nonprofit employee would wear to work in Bushwick, except Lively is 36 and the movie is set in Boston. The men are spared by virtue of being men and thus getting dressed in inoffensive variations of “plain pants and plain top.”
But—enough about the costumes (and whether or not they’re indicative of Blake Lively taking over creative control of the movie). There’s more to discuss with this movie, starting with the name of Lively’s protagonist, one Lily Blossom Bloom. Her occupation? Florist. The names of the two leading men are equally absurd: Ryles Kincaid (Justin Baldoni) and Atlas Corrigan (Brandon Skelnar). The names are indicative of an issue within “It Ends with Us”—author Colleen Hoover, no matter how she tried to sell her original book as a serious work of art, wrote something deeply unserious; unfortunately, Baldoni seems to have taken the book at face value, and tries to wring a meaningful narrative out of what is, ultimately, a book made to be read over the course of one day while tanning on a beach. As such, the movie can never quite decide what to do with itself, and Baldoni’s clear interest in the insidious, cyclical nature of domestic violence often gets hamstrung by unimportant things such as, you know, the sour material.
The story of “It Ends with Us” is a simple one: girl meets boy, they fall in love, boy turns out to have a problem with abusing women. Lily Blossom Bloom is the perfect romantic protagonist: she’s quirky, looks beautiful without trying (although it really would have helped if they had just put her in normal clothes and not whatever bangle-laden monstrosity Blake Lively pulled from her closet that day!), and makes way too much money than is realistic from her day job (get this—she’s a florist). There’s a meet-cute with Ryles, the hot neurosurgeon. Things go uphill for the two from there, and then rapidly downhill as Ryles’ meaner side comes out. Baldoni takes great pains to make Lily’s defenses of him believable; we watch and say, “Oh, it’s not that bad,” or “Oh, he didn’t mean it,” or “I can fix him and he’ll change.” Domestic violence does not always come from the obvious monsters. Maybe he truly didn’t mean it. Maybe he really can grow for the better. That doesn’t change what he does to Lily, and Baldoni smartly avoids melodrama in most of the scenes between Ryles and Lily (whilst leaning too much into it elsewhere, but oh well) to hammer home the truth—abusers can be people you know, people you love, people with good qualities, but they are still abusers.
The real head-scratcher for me is the inclusion of the third point in this little love triangle, Atlas, who was Lily’s friend and first love in high school. Also, he was homeless. Now he owns a restaurant. You see, anyone can make it in America! But I digress. Atlas seems superfluous to the plot except as a device to get Ryles angry at Lily, and his existence prompts several flashback sequences so long that I, stalwart advocate of proper phone etiquette, was tempted to scroll on Twitter in the movie theater. The flashbacks have no real purpose other than to show that Lily’s dad also sucked and Lily has always been the best person ever.
What really galls, though, is the part Atlas plays in Lily’s realization of her own abuse. He was apparently homeless because he had defended his own mother from an abusive boyfriend and the boyfriend had kicked this teenager named Atlas Corrigan (I mean, really, why would you inflict that name on your child?) out of the house. Later, when Atlas guesses that Ryles has hit Lily, Atlas proceeds to… hit Ryles in a public place. (Can I just say that if you are looking for someone to save you from domestic violence, it probably shouldn’t be someone who decides to wail on another guy in public even though you’re pleading with him to stop?) Apparently, Atlas—stalwart defender of women who happens to be hot and single—is the only person in Lily Blossom Bloom’s entire life who can save her from Ryles. His existence makes Lily nothing more than a princess in a tower waiting to let down her hair for her knight in shining armor, undermining the obvious message of empowerment that Baldoni is going for.
It’s a shame, because there’s actually a solid film lurking underneath the trappings of Hoover’s smutty beach read. The performances range from solid to good, and aside from those atrocious costumes, it looks decent enough for what it is—there’s nothing groundbreaking, but that’s to be expected. The first half of the movie is decent, and it’s really only the flashbacks and Atlas that drag it down; unfortunately, those take up too much time to be considered insignificant. I’ll blame that on Hoover herself but… damn, if only Justin Baldoni had chosen any other book to option. He handles the subject matter with too much tact to be saddled with such uninspiring source material.
And if only Blake Lively had chosen some decent clothes.
“It Ends with Us” Trailer
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