When wet-eyed florist Lily Bloom (Blake Lively) meets cute (if a little sadly) with hunky neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid (Justin Baldoni) toward the start of the new romantic drama It Ends With Us, the movie at least has the sense to have these two poke light fun at each other’s ridiculous names. That is an early sign that the film—adapted from Colleen Hoover’s beloved/reviled novel by screenwriter Christy Hall, directed by Baldoni—is in thoughtful hands. That softly wry self-awareness keeps the romance fluffy and appealing, and smartly textures the grave seriousness that is to come.
Aiding tremendously in that careful sense of balance is Lively. It Ends With Us joins a growing roster of sturdy vehicles for an actor who is almost a kind of alternate-dimension movie star. (Complimentary.) Lively has made a series of films unlike the ones a lot of perhaps bigger names are making these days: the magical-realist romance of The Age of Adaline, the tense domestic thriller-drama of All I See Is You, the twisty mystery of A Simple Favor. Her Gravity-but-it’s-a-shark thriller The Shallows is more in line with other recent studio product, but it nonetheless has a uniquely Livelian flair. One appreciates that Lively is plugging away in her particular fashion; and, hey, her one boondoggle superhero movie, Green Lantern, at least introduced her to her husband.
In It Ends With Us, Lively gives glowing voice and body to an old-fashioned issues drama, albeit one with decidedly modern embellishments. When we first meet Lily, she is reluctantly returning to her native Maine (a made-up town called Plethora, for some reason) for her father’s memorial service. Her mother (played by the great Chicago theater actress Amy Morton) is fussing about in her grief, but Lily is cold, reserved. She takes the stage to speak at her father’s memorial, but walks off not even halfway through.
Exploring the past that led Lily there is half of the movie. The other half concerns Ryle, who sweeps Lily off her feet just as Lily has befriended his peppery sister, Allysa (Jenny Slate, funny and touching). As it lushly unfolds (Hoboken and Jersey City make for lovely Boston stand-ins), It Ends With Us reveals itself as a film about the long-lasting scars of domestic abuse, as Lily weighs the risks and benefits of choosing to trust a man when others in her life have given her little reason to.
Lively delicately calibrates Lily’s guardedness; she is both a flower-loving, funky-dressing free spirit and a wounded soul who protects herself with a certain loner mettle. Lively’s performance mostly consists of coy flirting, naturalistic murmurs, and the effortful cheer of strained conversations. It’s a mode in which she works well. That Lily is something of a passive cipher, reacting mostly to the threatening or nurturing intrusions of men, is less a limiting facet of Lively’s work than it is of the story being told. It Ends With Us—in the generous read that I am, at the moment, willing to give it—is about a recessive person working past the muffling effect of trauma to finally address the pain of the past and wrest free from its all-consuming influence.
Where the movie wanders into tricky territory is in its long view of reconciliation. Critics of the book see Hoover’s narrative as downplaying domestic violence by complicating Lily’s relationship to it. I have not read the novel, so can only assess what I’ve seen in the film. It presents an admirably nuanced but firm take on Lily’s circumstances, allowing for an understanding of an abuser that neither necessarily includes nor precludes forgiveness. Maybe the best way to look at the messaging of It Ends With Us is that the conclusions of the film work well enough for Lily; they need not be seen as explicit guidance to anyone in the real world.
Which is a tricky line to tread in our very charged and discourse-prone age, when specific stories are often read broadly, audited for their instructive value or rhetorical harm. Hoover courts perhaps the most controversy by framing her story as something of a love triangle between Lily, Ryler, and Atlas Corrigan (Brandon Sklenar), a former high school flame who was no stranger to abuse himself, and who re-enters Lily’s life at a moment either inopportune or right on time. But the film doesn’t really configure this as a choice between two men. It is, quite persuasively, more about a common bond shared by old loves and commiserators that takes on new relevance when the present begins to echo history. It’s a disarmingly poignant idea that a kinship like that, though untended to for so long, could still prove so vital.
Yes, the usual junky Nicholas Sparks-ian trappings are there. Atlas (whose name is never mocked) is a shaggy, pickup-driving former Marine turned soulful chef—a man whose hands are rougher than vain, educated, insecure Ryle’s. It Ends With Us is rather prescriptive about gender roles, of sturdy masculinity and frail bird femininity. But just after a man pledges to protect an infant girl in his arms, her mother promises the child something deeper, truer, less generic. It Ends With Us is a tearjerker that indulges in its red-meat drama, but then gives it the grace of shading and complexity—and rare humanity.
