‘It Ends With Us’ Review: Blake Lively Stars in Serviceable Adaptation of Colleen Hoover Novel
It’s fitting that we meet Lily Bloom, the charming but thinly written protagonist of It Ends With Us, marching out of a church. Beneath the surface of wide-eyed smiles and laughs lies a steely resolve. The young woman drove from Boston to her hometown in Maine for her father’s funeral. The event turned out to be a tense affair, one that ends with Lily, tasked with delivering the eulogy, leaving the service altogether. Despite her mother’s earlier pleas, the young woman has no kind words to say about her father. She can’t list five things she liked about him.
The root of this tension becomes clearer later on in this serviceable adaptation of the popular Colleen Hoover novel, directed by and co-starring Justin Baldoni (Jane the Virgin). But until then, Lily (Blake Lively) tends to her new-ish life in Boston. This involves opening the flower shop of her dreams and falling for Ryle Kincaid (Baldoni), an attractive neurosurgeon she meets soon after the funeral.
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Lily also makes a new friend, a perky woman who stumbles upon the flower shop before its opening. In the logic of contrived storytelling, Allysa (Jenny Slate) is, of course, related to Ryle. Double dates — with Lily, Ryle, Allysa and her husband, Marshall (Hasan Minhaj) — become regular occurrences.
Because Lily’s life, as rendered in DP Barry Peterson’s intimate, golden-hued visual grammar, feels like a dream, the nightmarish details can be easy to miss. It Ends With Us is a portrait of domestic abuse tucked in the frame of a romance.
Hoover’s novel, which has spent more than two years at the top of the The New York Times best-seller list, drew criticism for its depiction of intimate partner abuse. Some readers found the focus on Lily’s relationship with her abuser, Ryle, to be manipulative. Others blamed the publicity machinations for falsely advertising the novel as a love-triangle romance. The plan to release an accompanying coloring book (eventually scrapped) didn’t help Hoover’s case, either.
But a strength of both the novel and Baldoni’s screen translation is how firmly the filmmaker anchors us in Lily’s perspective, which eases viewers into the most violent parts of the story. The time dedicated to understanding how Lily falls in love with Ryle heightens the emotional stakes of the florist’s difficult journey and shows how coercive abusive partnerships can be.
Although there are early signs of trouble in the relationship — Ryle’s volatile temper, for instance, and the way he repeatedly pushes Lily’s boundaries — the film is effective in how it casts a chilling kind of doubt.
It Ends With Us struggles much more in other places. The screenplay, by Daddio director Christy Hall, makes an effort with some early winking jokes that acknowledge the novel’s clichés. But the adaptation can’t be saved from the contrivance baked into the original text.
Details are scant when not focused on Lily’s struggle with abuse and the generational patterns she wants to break. Through flashbacks, we come to learn that a young Lily (an excellent Isabela Ferrer) routinely witnessed her father beating her mother.
Few people aside from her high school love interest Atlas (played by Alex Neustaedter as a youth and Brandon Sklenar as an adult) know about this traumatic period in her life. The depth of their bond is presented to us in fitfully poignant glimpses into the past.
Issues of cliché and vagueness plague all the characters. Despite the film’s more than two-hour run time, Lily, Ryle and later Atlas remain stubbornly thin. Lively’s charm can only carry Lily so far before the character starts to feel too one-note. Any interest from the script in exploring her florist business evaporates once men begin to figure more prominently in her life. Her friendship with Allysa, while meaningful to Lily, also is underexplored.
A later conversation between Lily and her mother (Amy Morton) is particularly frustrating because it’s a missed opportunity to engage with the complex web of reasons survivors struggle to leave abusive relationships.
The pat treatment of these characters ultimately does a disservice to the broader themes embedded in It Ends With Us. Without understanding more of Lily’s broader community or getting a stronger sense of how she navigates the relationship with Ryle, the film can feel too light and wispy to support the weight of its themes.
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