Katie Walsh Tribune News Service
To understand the new romantic melodrama It Ends With Us, starring Blake Lively, it is important to understand that it exists in a context: the long tradition of the “chick flick” and the current landscape of the publishing industry, which is dominated by female authors and consumers. This understanding explains the film’s existence, as it appeals to an audience often overlooked in today’s film market and has a high profile.
Adapted for the screen by Christy Hall, It Ends With Us is based on the highly successful 2016 novel by Colleen Hoover, an author who initially self-published her books. They became so popular on Kindle Unlimited that she made the New York Times bestseller list alone before being signed by Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster. It Ends With Us is a cathartic personal story for Hoover, grounded in family experiences, about a woman, Lily (played by Lively in the film), who breaks a cycle of domestic violence she witnessed in her parents’ marriage and later experienced herself in a toxic relationship.
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The story follows Lily (last name Bloom, yes, that’s familiar), a young woman living in Boston who dreams of opening her own flower shop (yes, it’s called “Lily Bloom’s”). The film begins with her father’s (Kevin McKidd) funeral, where Lily struggles to name even a few things she loved and respected about him. While processing her complex emotions on a rooftop terrace at night, she meets a handsome neurosurgeon with a hot temper, Ryle Kincaid (Justin Baldoni).
When they meet him again by chance months later, his sister Allysa (Jenny Slate) now works at Lily Bloom, and they begin a relationship that is complicated by another chance encounter: with Lily’s first love, Atlas Corrigan (Brandon Sklenar), the handsome chef and owner of her favorite restaurant, whom Lily hasn’t seen since high school. Ryle’s jealousy of Atlas escalates the increasing volatility of their relationship, which has led to violence and hurt toward Lily, whether accidental or not.
For all the limitations of Hoover’s novel, with its childish writing style and awkward prose, it is at least clear-eyed about the reality of domestic violence. Lily in the book is young (early 20s) and an often irritatingly immature character, but she at least has an open eye for what is happening in her relationship. The Lily in the film seems older and cooler; Hall’s dialogue is much sharper and funnier. But in the film, Lily suffers from delusions about her relationship, and the film blurs the lines of abuse for too long to a frustrating extent that essentially robs our heroine of agency and leaves out some of Ryle’s obvious manipulations.
What’s notable here is that Baldoni, who plays the violent Ryle, is also the film’s director. Perhaps it was the script, or it was a top-down decision based on test screenings and audience reaction, but the story clearly chose to hide Ryle’s true nature and reveal his intentions in a montage late in the film, which is inconsistent with the progression of events in Hoover’s narrative. Perhaps this decision was made so that audiences (who may not have read the book) wouldn’t turn against his character too early.
Other small changes in the narrative also soften some of Ryle’s dark actions. The decision to shorten, delete and change lines in the adaptation is necessary, but the choices made for this adaptation result in our heroine, although she appears much more mature and intelligent, becoming a helpless, complicit and confused figure, which is troubling when dealing with this subject of domestic violence.
Baldoni’s approach to crafting the stylistic world of “It Ends With Us” is to offer the romantic, escapist fantasy inherent in the literary and cinematic genre: lavish costumes and production designs, luxurious interiors, a Boston where it mysteriously never snows, elaborate courtship and seduction montages set to contemporary indie ballads. It never feels like it’s set in the real world, but since this is a romantic melodrama, it doesn’t need to. But there are also harsh realities that the story must confront, and sugarcoating Lily’s experience by softening the blow, so to speak, doesn’t come close to the hard truths Hoover brought to light in her book, which obviously appealed to a large female readership craving stories like this one.
It Ends With Us continues the tradition of “chick flicks” that were an integral part of Hollywood filmmaking in the 1940s – Bette Davis could have starred in a version of one 80 years ago. But chick flicks also have to express hard truths, which unfortunately feel muddled here, in a botched adaptation that is simultaneously too close and too far from its source material.
