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The surprise bestseller by Colleen Hoover on which this film is based, and named, actually held very few surprises. Nice, kind girl meets a homeless, groovily blue-eyed boy, and backyard access and an open window do the rest. Nice, kind girl grows up into Blake Lively and meets a rich, hot neurosurgeon, when some remarkably scrawny flowers and copious, copulating flirtation do the rest.
There was the matter of domestic abuse that set this standard template apart, but Hoover’s book and now this film are so concentrated on the romances and the sex that this serious subject is never treated with any amount of complexity.
It’s also contentious whether Lively, she of the perpetually wistful look, look-at-me smiles and golden-girl aura, is the right actor to play Lily and do the switch between the girl who sneaks homeless boys into her home (Atlas, played as older man by Sklenar), to the woman who has rich, successful and supposedly gorgeous men like Ryle (Baldoni) panting for her, to the woman who must make some very hard decisions while running a business that, for really no sane reason at all, is an instant hit.
And all this while, making some very rich friends very, very quickly – yeah, because that’s how rich people are. Thankfully, though, the rich couple she befriends are played by the ever-great Jenny Slate and Minhaj (who has little to do).
To be fair to the film, directed by Baldoni – who gives himself a lot of screen time but not the kind of breaks the book offers Ryle – it gives us some idea of the kind of confusion an incident of violence from someone you love can leave you with.
Despite the experience of her own abusive father, Lily buries the details of these incidents deep into her mind.
But then the film chooses to skim through a lot of that horror, and a lot of the day after. Which is what makes It Ends With Us such a copout and a pretence when it comes to domestic abuse. It gives us no sense of the strengths of the loves that bind us, the loves that hold us back, the loves we can’t leave behind, the loves we need not, and the loves that set us free.
The book at least gave us a glimpse of what a rare, uncomplicated love can be, in the shape of teenagers Atlas and Lily (played by actors who unfortunately look older), who are two lost kids who find each other.
Atlas is a bland bystander in the film in comparison and, as played by the indifferent Sklenar with a hand perpetually covering his mouth, even more so.
When he tells Lily, “If you can find in your heart someone to love again, fall in love with me”, you don’t even skip a heart beat. Or believe, yeah, it ends with them.
It Ends With Us
It Ends With Us movie director: Justin Baldoni
It Ends With Us movie cast: Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni, Brandon Sklenar, Jenny Slate, Hasan Minhaj
It Ends With Us movie rating: 1.5 stars
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