Adapted from the Colleen Hoover novel, Lily overcomes a traumatic childhood to embark on a new life. A chance meeting with a neurosurgeon sparks a connection, but Lily begins to see sides of him that remind her of her parents’ relationship.
I once conversed with a young, aspiring novelist who introduced me to the name Colleen Hoover. To say she viewed Hoover negatively would be an understatement, as she ranted to me about all of the reasons she felt this way, with one standout being that one book she had read asked the viewer to express sympathy for abusive male characters. I never researched the author afterward to see if there was anything to this grievance, so that statement is the only thing I knew about Hoover going into this movie. With that in mind, I went in not expecting much and, in fact, honestly intended to hate it based on a multitude of aspects that I won’t delve into here.
What can I say? I was right. But I was also wrong.
“It Ends with Us” confirmed my fears in its opening frames, with uninspired drone shots pulling us into its world before introducing us to Lily Bloom (Blake Lively), returning home for a melodramatic exposition dump with her mother (Amy Morton), who quickly reveals to us in an embarrassingly expository way that Lily’s father Andrew (Kevin McKidd) has passed away. This leads to the funeral, where Lily Bloom cannot express love for her father before finally taking us to the meat of our story. Nothing new under the sun here, and that’s okay, but everything happens so quickly with no time to linger on any moment that could inspire emotion from the audience so that the moments don’t land.
“Two more hours of this,” I thought with a sigh, but then a breath of fresh air.
Our following scene sees Lily returning to Boston, sitting atop a rooftop, lost in thought as she meets the immediately charming Ryle Kincaid (Justin Baldoni) for the first time, and it’s at this moment that I was filled with hope. Lily and Ryle meet, exchange banter, and learn much about each other in such little time. It’s a scene that runs so long that it might seem to overstay its welcome in less capable hands, but Lively and Baldoni have such charmingly palpable chemistry with one another that you never seem to mind. It sets up the promise of something good, certainly better than its opening moments, and that’s where it gets tricky.
“It Ends with Us” delivers a script that never rises to be above average, but it’s elevated by an exceptional cast delivering solid performances. Even as the movie oscillates between average and compelling, every actor understands the assignment, with a particularly excellent performance from Jenny Slate, who supplies her trademark comedic genius in spades while also taking a nice turn into dramatic territory. Again, Baldoni is perfectly charming, and Brandon Sklenar is strong as the ex-love Atlas Corrigan. But the star here is Blake Lively, stronger than she’s ever been, delivering a performance that balances an overwhelming charm with a deep-rooted sadness and fear that only grows more fierce as the movie unfolds.
The longer the movie went on, the more I found myself enjoying it against my will, caring about the plights of these characters, choosing who to root for, feeling their pain and their joy, smiling and laughing, and feeling the tension in all the ways it was intended for me to feel.
And then the downfall.
It’s no secret that the topic of “It Ends with Us” is abuse and how its ability to live on, not just with those who suffered directly from its hands but those who bore witness to it and were incapable of stopping it, swearing never to allow themselves to suffer it the same way. It’s a topic that has been explored repeatedly, sometimes better and sometimes worse, and should continue to be for as long as there are stories to tell because it doesn’t simply go away. But its exploration in “It Ends with Us” isn’t only insulting and irresponsible, it’s downright toxic.
To express my grievances, I have to work hard to avoid spoilers because the aspects of this film that eliminated my ability to enjoy it entirely are significant plot points that shouldn’t be given away and won’t be here, but some of the choices made by the characters by the end are genuinely baffling, particularly in a day and age where we’ve seen more and more abusers held accountable for their actions. But “It Ends with Us” not only offers little accountability, it asks us to sympathize with the abusers. And that’s where I checked out because no amount of sad stories delivered by abusers can ever make their actions okay, and yet here we are being asked to, yes, call them on their actions but feel sympathy for them while we do.
I really did find myself enjoying this movie a great deal more than I ever could have imagined, and I envisioned that I would walk out giving it a 3.5/5, but these final mind-boggling twenty minutes sent it into a dizzying downward spiral that made me say “gross” when the credits rolled. I’d be willing to bet that Hoover hasn’t experienced the things she’s writing about here, and the inexperience comes through in her treatment of the subject matter. I didn’t hate it the way I thought I would, enjoying so much of what it had to offer, but in the end, I hated it for entirely separate reasons.
It seems that the aspiring young writer was onto something, after all.
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