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| Courtesy of Sony Pictures |
“It Ends with Us” is buried beneath the veiled romance, beneath the delicately sketched images, the endless montage sequences, the emotional screams of the soundtrack and Blake Lively’s luxuriously dyed hair on the beach in Malibu. A tough little movie about women, about bad choices, about bad men and about decisions that don’t fit into a neat pattern.
Blake Lively protagonists like Lily Bloom, a beauty with a traumatic history, a vivacious ex and a passion for gardening. In the film, she falls in love with a neurosurgeon. She also befriends a sympathetic assistant, opens a quirky flower shop, endures pain and finds herself after much thought and many twists and turns. It’s hard to do, but Lily Bloom embraces everything life throws at her with her thoughtful style and neo-bohemian-influenced vibe. She has a woman’s dream, an ideal to aspire to, a Mildred Pierce of the Instagram era.
You may know Mildred from the Turner Classic Movies as the bakery survivor played by Joan Crawford in the 1945 film noir “Mildred Pierce.” Mildred enters this classic wearing a mink coat with linebacker’s epaulets and the kind of shock a woman feels when she discovers her good second husband is sleeping with her not-so-good teenage daughter, and the kid is leaving. It’s no wonder that when Mildred looks out at the nighttime waters of the Pacific Ocean, she seems to be contemplating her dark past and future, as Lily Bloom does one evening on a Boston rooftop at the beginning of It Ends with Us.
It doesn’t take Lily Bloom long to consider her existential options, as the roof restorations are soon halted by neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid (Justin Baldoni). A brooding hunk with soft eyes, hard muscles, and a limp miraculously unchanged for three days, Ryle Kincaid has a touch of menace and a gift for cornball jokes, and before long, he and Lily Bloom are circling each other. Love germinates, yes, blossoms, and Lily Bloom moves in with Ryle Kincaid. It feels like a contrived gimmick (Justin Baldoni indulges in plenty of close-ups), though anyone familiar with the conventions of romantic fiction will be surprised by the intensity of his focus. A perfect man doesn’t necessarily have a perfect life, you know?
Adapted from Colin Hoover’s best-selling novel by Christy Hall, It Ends with Us is utterly funny, sometimes touching, often hilarious, at 2 hours and 10 minutes, almost obnoxiously long. It’s visually and narratively overcrowded, full of flashbacks to Lily Bloom as a teenager (Isabella Ferrer) that create two parallel plots. As an adult Lily Bloom moves in with Ryle Kincaid and opens her own boutique, aided by a sycophantic assistant, Alyssa (Jenny Slate), who carries her luxury bags and gossips on the run, images of the past fill Lily Bloom’s story with a high school romance and that of her high school classmates, Atlas Corrigan.
Even the most campy love stories have a way of hooking you, this one does at least sometimes. Love stories work on us because love, with the added bonus of watching beautiful people suffer beautifully, is one of the reasons movies were invented. Blake Lively is uniquely suited to the role and has some powerful moments, but she often gets bogged down in the making of the film. Flashbacks add information, but they distance you from the adult Lily Bloom, fragmenting Blake Lively’s performance and distracting from the slow pace of her scenes. Just as Justin Baldoni unfortunately makes everything beautiful, the trees, the cityscapes, the people, to the point that every detail, pose and smile is lifted from a lifestyle ad rather than from real, messy reality.
What’s most interesting about It Ends with Us is how it simultaneously exploits romantic conventions and tries to sidestep the more regressive aspects of those conventions. Balancing these elements is tricky, and it’s part of the reason compelling love stories are so hard to make today. One obvious problem is that women who have real choices, straight, sapphic or queer, who gets married or not, who has kids or cats or both, don’t fit easily or reflexively into tired Hollywood formulas. With her traumas and therapeutic epiphanies, her shiny boots and Carhartt tracksuit, Lily Bloom seems perfectly modern, but she’s trapped in a story that’s past its sell-by date.