Review: 'It Ends With Us' leans into its passionate romance, while softening the depiction of domestic violence
In a previous Hollywood era, movies like “It Ends With Us” were more common — dreamily registered romantic dramas about weighty topics featuring impossibly gorgeous leading ladies being put through hell, eventually triumphing before the closing credits.
Director Justin Baldoni and screenwriter Christy Hall have adapted Colleen Hoover’s novel, published in 2016 and revived on BookTok during the COVID-19 pandemic, into a love triangle among beautiful actors — with the ravishing Blake Lively as the focal point — whose romantic moments have the unfortunate effect of blunting the story’s depiction of domestic violence.
Lively’s character, Lily Bloom, acknowledges upon first meeting neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid (played by Baldoni), that her name is a bit ridiculous — a situation compounded by her pursuit of her lifelong dream of opening a flower shop in Boston. After some flirting, Lily tells Ryle she wants a commitment, while Ryle is merely interested in casual sex.
As Lily starts creating her flower shop, she gets her first employee, Allysa (Jenny Slate), who’s married to a finance guy, Marshall (Hasan Minhaj), and decides to work for Lily out of boredom. Allysa introduces Lily to her brother — who turns out to be Ryle, and the sparks start flying again.
As Lily and Ryle get closer, Hall (whose directing debut “Daddio” debuted earlier this year) writes up a flashback, to when a high-school Lily (newcomer Isabela Ferrer) had her first romance, with classmate Atlas Corrigan (Alex Neustaedter), who at the time was homeless, thrown out by his mom for getting between her and an abusive boyfriend. Lily, whose father (Kevin McKidd) hit her mother (Amy Morton), can relate.
Back in the present, Lily and Ryle are taking Lily’s mother out to dinner, and Lily recognizes their server is Atlas (now played by Brandon Sklenar), who’s a chef and restaurant owner. Almost immediately after that, an incident at home, in which an enraged Ryle strikes Lily and gives her a shiner, gets Lily considering whether she’s going down the same path as her mother.
Baldoni, as director, captures the romantic moments between Lily and Ryle as passionately as a PG-13 rating will allow. But the moments of domestic abuse are deferred, shown either fleetingly or discreetly off-camera, dulling the power those scenes might have had to propel Lily’s transformation from victim to fierce survivor. (It’s not exaggerating to say that Lively probably takes more punches onscreen in her cameo appearance in “Deadpool & Wolverine,” administered by real-life husband Ryan Reynolds in one of that movie’s spasms of comedic violence, than she does here.)
Lively gives a fully inhabited performance as Lily, demonstrating that even someone with movie-star beauty and the grit to launch a small business can fall prey to violence from a mercurial figure in her own home. Even when the story beats are at their most predictable — several shots are devoted to Lively’s Lily looking in a mirror and applying concealer to an injury to her face — Lively brings her enormous empathy to them.
One might wish Baldoni and Hall would tackle the topic of domestic violence as forcefully as Hoover’s novel, with its rallying cry of a title, apparently did. The filmmakers hedge their bets, guessing that moviegoers don’t want to pay $15 to seek Lively get hit realistically by her co-star, and deprive their star of the chance to show her acting chops and deliver a stinging message about domestic abuse.
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‘It Ends With Us’
★★1/2
Opens Friday, August 9, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for domestic violence, sexual content and some strong language. Running time: 130 minutes.