***1/2 out of ****
It was completely by accident that I saw It Ends with Us. In a confusing back-and-forth with my fellow moviegoer, I booked tickets to the wrong movie. Since I had assumed they had chosen it (they actually wanted to see something with much worse reviews), I was intrigued as I’ve been waiting a long time for a movie that would let Blake Lively’s obvious talent shine. Perhaps booking the wrong tickets was the best decision I’ve made all year.
Based on Colleen Hoover’s New York Times best-seller, It End with Us follows Lily Bloom (Lively) as she returns to her hometown in Maine to deliver a eulogy for her father, a wife-beater for whom she can find no positive words at all. From the very beginning, you can see Justin Baldoni’s direction is leading to something explosive, but you rightly cannot tell what. Lily returns to Boston to open a florist’s shop. Even the obvious silliness of her name is handled in such a way to belie the often too-on-the-nose words of a popular fiction bestseller.
We learn her name through a rooftop discussion she has with the neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid (played by the director). Bloom, a free spirit with a deeply hurt soul but a smile that was infectious even to me, has a rooftop spot where she likes to look out on the city. The issue is the apartment complex is not her own, but Ryle’s. Our first introduction to Ryle foreshadows much to come later, but their pleasant conversation sets up what you think is going to be a run-of-the-mill romantic dramedy, but It Ends with Us is far from that.
While they are almost certain they will never meet again, this plan is foiled when Lily hires Ryle’s sister Allysa (a rare dramatic part for Jenny Slate) and Ryle drops by to see where she has been working. Through a series of nights-out that eventually become double dates, Ryle and Lily do form a relationship much to the surprise of Allysa, who sees her brother as a perpetual womanizer. Intercut with all of this is Lily’s backstory. The perfectly cast young Lily is newcomer Isabela Ferrer. The likeness and behavior between the two actresses is one of the small marvels of the movie. Lily’s backstory is not only full of dealing with living in domestic violence, but also her first relationship—one with a young man named Atlas (Alex Neustaedter)—who is homeless and living in an abandoned house across from the Bloom family.
We are doled out the right measures of the past and present as we discover a creeping instability in her adult relationship with Ryle and the catastrophic way Atlas left her life. On one double date, Lily, Ryle, Alyssa, and her husband (Hasan Minhaj), try out the hottest place to eat in Boston—a new restaurant owned by none other than the grown-up Atlas (Brandon Sklenar) who has turned out well despite his upbringing. Bloom’s emotions flounder when they re-connect, and Ryle’s suspicious nature becomes more acute.
To give away much more would ruin the experience of the film to those who haven’t seen it, even though the novel has been out for eight years. Suffice it to say, the early moments of the film remain in the back of your mind as you try to make out whether Ryle is the real deal or not and the resolution of the following plot machinations are superbly rendered. For those who haven’t read the book (like me) it was a roller coaster that left me a bit weepy, with fullness of heart, and enraptured as I left the theater.
The film has received mixed reviews, but audiences love it, and I have to side with the audiences on this one. We sat in front of a young woman already seeing the film for the second time and recommending the book even higher. I have never been much of a fan of popular fiction, but such books often make better movies than highly regarded literary novels. For example, if The Godfather has been shot the way Mario Puzo’s potboiler was written, it would be not a masterpiece, but an embarrassment. It’s a crapshoot. Pop fiction writers often come up with better stories and more interesting characters (think Thomas Harris, Stephen King occasionally), but lit fiction writers are more concerned with style and their novels, like Snow Falling on Cedars, make turgid films, despite that author, David Guterson, being one of its few admirers.
Lively is magnificent in the part of Lily. This is a grown-up part for an actress who has been underutilized in most of her efforts. The other actors are equally at home in their roles, though Skelnar doesn’t rise to more than a Netflix series level of acting and seeing Jenny Slate doing something other than sketch comedy felt a bit off-kilter. It is not that she’s bad in the part, it’s just a change for me. One, perhaps, I’ll have to get used to.
Much has been made of the film’s publicity not giving appropriate “trigger warnings” for the grown-up children posing as adults we have now, but to do so would have been to betray how the story is told and what it is trying to say. Lively was bullied into making an online statement that she had no moral responsibility to make. Our modern bullies think they’re the good guys. Really, they are proof that adolescent thinking has now persisted in many people well into their 40s.
It Ends with Us
Blake Lively as Lily Bloom
Justin Baldoni as Ryle Kincaid
Brandon Skelnar as Atlas Corrigan
Jenny Slate as Allysa
Hasan Minhaj as Marshall
Directed by Justin Baldoni
Screenplay by Christy Hall, based on the novel by Colleen Hoover
Produced by Alex Saks, Jarney Heath, Blake Lively, and Christy Hall
Photographed by Barry Peterson
Edited by Oona Flaherty and Robb Sullivan
Music by Rob Simonsen and Duncan Blickenstaff
Columbia Pictures
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