★★
To give credit where credit is due, It ends with us knows his likely audience. Or rather, he knows exactly which quadrant of the four squares interests him and does not hide his pursuit. Based on the bestselling novel by self-published sensation Colleen Hoover, the film starts from the hip in search of extremely underserved moviegoers. This like dead Pool cuts off the arms on the next screen – which isn’t to say Swifties don’t love Marvel too. Where this film caused Madonna massacres, however, It ends with us tailors in Taylor. It’s a bright, endlessly Instagrammable affair, with floral imagery and synth soundtrack ballads deployed to almost parodic effect. Real life is complicated, It ends with us is anything but.
Set in a perpetually autumnal Boston, the film paints from an auburn color palette, each frame shot in beautiful synchronicity with the auburn aesthetic of Blake Lively, who plays melancholy florist Lily Bloom. The film is directed by Justin Baldoni, who is only making his third effort after the equally sickening Clouds And Five feet apart. He also plays the role of the handsome and brooding Ryle Kincaid. Already, a sense of arc and text is apparent. A blind viewer would have no difficulty guessing the film’s literary origins. A screenplay adapted by Daddio’s Christy Hall doesn’t quite make sense to rearrange Hoover’s dialogue for the natural ear. No one in real life says things like “I’m a naturally happy person” or “We all have an idea of what love can be.”
No more likely is a meeting on a rooftop, under a dark night sky, in which complete strangers come into immediate distribution and begin to reveal wild and intimate secrets to each other. Or, the next day, Ryle’s manic pixie sister spontaneously walks into Lily’s wreck of a new store and asks for work, even though she hates flowers. Such individuals would surely be completely unbearable in real life and would feel inconceivable without the Richard and Judy book club. The appeal – unlimited wealth and sexy dinners – is obvious but makes for an odd stylistic establishment for the heavy themes to come. Naturalism is a difficult companion for the bougie soap opera.
Flashbacks reveal a past of two halves for Lily. An abusive father and the moving first love that she hides from him. It’s about Atlas Corrigan, another victim of domestic violence, who grows up to become a chic lumberjack Brandon Sklenar. Another twist of fate, Atlas has opened an artisan restaurant a few blocks from Lily’s shop and is therefore harsh when Ryle turns out to be more Wickham than Darcy in the ranking of eligible gentlemen. The name really should have been more revealing. That, and an immediately disturbing performance from Baldoni. Sklenar is gentler but his Atlas serves more to guide Lily towards a reassessment of her present through the prism of her past than to stir up passions.
In this sense, the film is reminiscent of Jean-Marc Vallée’s HBO adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s “Sharp Objects” — and not just because of the visual similarities between Lively here and Amy Adams there. It ends with us doesn’t quite have the incisive darkness of this series and therefore can’t match the punch. Broader strokes aim for bigger, easier emotions. The message of empowerment has more power than sincerity. And yet, in lighting its last embers, the film unearths a late act that had a real impact. Lively guides us through this momentary enlightenment with an embrace of emotional honesty. Throughout, even though the clichés and claps make one’s eyes roll, his performance is generous of heart.
What’s impressive is Lively’s ability to pull this off, even if her character proves to be the least convincing in the film. Without the dramatic flaws of her male counterparts or the zany force of nature materialized by her closest friend – Jenny Slate’s Allysa – Lily simply exists, a conduit to the vital point. The actions of others are not a woman’s doing and that is not enough to round out her humanity. More than any other character in the film, Lily embodies the superficial reality of the world on display. Attractive, emotional and warm but cut and arranged like the proverbial flower; that is to say, not really alive.
T.S.