August 12, 2024 · Watch the official trailer
Perspective in filmmaking matters, especially when it comes to adapting literary works onto the big screen and taking another creative work to transpose it onto a different format.
This is especially problematic with the theatrical adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s bestselling novel, “It Ends With Us,” which debuted to tremendous box office success this past weekend.
The female-centric drama that hard transitions from lighthearted romance to heavy issue film is poorly mishandled by “Five Feet Apart” director Justin Baldoni, whose worldview of this movie is seemingly jarred by the fact that he also cast himself as the film’s leading man turned erstwhile villain.
At its core, “It Ends With Us” is a cautionary tale about ending the cycle of domestic abuse in romantic relationships and the film often feels tone-deaf to these concerns – minimizing or often outright justifying harmful situations – when the female perspective is shown through a male lens.
Blake Lively stars as Lily, a young woman starting her own flower shop in Boston who falls for a charismatic yet standoffish doctor while simultaneously navigating the reemergence of her childhood boyfriend.
If the film focused on the breezy love triangle potentially at play between Lily and her two suitors, Baldoni makes sense as the film’s director. By the second half of “It Ends With Us,” however, his Ryle starts to show the darker underbelly of his personality with no clear explanation.
There’s a lack of understanding and character development necessary to justify the film’s significantly more sinister, mixed tone and the entirely of the latter half of the film comes across as a man interpreting how a woman might feel about being assaulted by her male partner.
Baldoni – and to an extent Hoover as author and Christy Hall as screenwriter – soften the blows of the film’s narrative by playing out scenes in melodrama, where everything feels bathed in an artificial, almost sugarcoated hue and undercuts some of the nuanced character work Lively does in navigating Lily’s reactions to the increasingly aggressive behavior Ryle displays.
Similar motifs are much more expertly handled in the 2022 drama “Alice, Darling” where director Mary Nighy leads Anna Kendrick through the ending of a dark abusive relationship with more significant emotional stakes while better balancing the shifting tones and keeping the film grounded from a female perspective.
What makes “It Ends With Us” work even somewhat is the dynamic effort given by Lively throughout, portraying all aspects of Lily’s character well though the uneven nature of Hall’s screenplay and the woefully misguided direction waste large segments of her performance.
Pivotal scenes in the film’s finale are wholly saved thanks to Lively’s ability to convey passion and resilience in the moment and without her steady presence centering the film, “It Ends With Us” would be a complete disaster of a project.
Jenny Slate does a solid job bringing needed levity as well as portraying the compassionate friend Allysa, and yet, like all secondary characters, the character beats are so thinly written that viewers never really experience any development or growth in anyone other than Lily over the course of two hours.
Baldoni, for his part, is effective at playing the charming louse Ryle with relative contempt in a way that audiences will easily grow to be reviled at his character, though the lack of overall on-screen chemistry he shares with Lively does significantly reduce the emotional impact of Ryle’s darker turn.
The film also interweaves flashback sequences from Lily’s teenage years as a way of balancing out Ryle with her young love interest Atlas as well as introducing her parents’ relationship affecting Lily’s worldview, though the vast tonal shifts this creates in the narrative can occasionally be wonky.
A film that will be watched far more casually than it probably should be, “It Ends With Us” struggles to lift up a solid Lively performance and properly balance heavy issues with light melodrama in an effective manner, making the film something audiences might want to wait until viewing at home or in a setting where the movie’s darker themes can be properly discussed after watching.
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