It takes the better part of two, exhausting hours before Blake Lively’s Lily Blossom Bloom utters the fateful words, “It ends with us,” words meant as an expression of Lily’s agency, autonomy, and self-determination. It’s the equivalent of “This far, but no further,” a clear-eyed decision by Lively’s Lily to live her best life free of the generational trauma that until then guided, if not outright directed, her choices. Not coincidentally, those words are also the title of Colleen Hoover’s bestselling 2016 novel and the listless, surface-deep adaptation helmed by actor-producer-director Justin Baldoni.
A sometime actor and producer, Baldoni cast himself as Lily’s romantic partner and eventual domestic abuser, Ryle Kincaid. Equipped with impossibly toned, hairless abs, and a propensity to go shirtless at a moment’s notice, he’s got a predictably traumatic past of his own. The revelation of that past simultaneously explains everything and nothing at all, but it’s enough to create a sliver of sympathy for Ryle if not for his conduct toward Lily, the woman he claims he loves, wants to protect, etc.
Instead, Ryle represents a familiar romantic cliche: the (near) incarnation of looks, wealth (for ease of living), and status (he’s a neurosurgeon). That Ryle could have walked out of hundreds, if not thousands, of cookie-cutter Lifetime Movies goes unmentioned by anyone and everyone, including Lily who, at least at first, resists his overbearing charms on the rooftop of the high-end building where Ryle, his sister, Allysa (Jenny Slate), and her husband, Marshall (Hasan Minhaj), live. Oddly, Lily doesn’t live there, but somehow found her way to the rooftop where she hoped to contemplate her conflicted feelings toward her recently departed father, Andrew (Kevin McKidd), the beloved mayor of a small Maine town and the abusive husband to Lily’s long-suffering mother, Jenny (Amy Morton).
Their rooftop meeting qualifies as the generic “meet cute” typical of romantic dramas or melodramas, but it also introduces Ryle’s temper, albeit toward an inanimate object, a chair, the result of a no-good, terrible day surgery-wise. As a sign of Ryle’s temper, his abuse of the chair should immediately give Lily pause. It does and doesn’t. She objects less to his temper than to his stated desire to sleep with her without the customary rituals associated with heterosexual mating.
It doesn’t, however, end there. After Lily uses her savings to open her dream flower shop nearby, in walks Ryle’s heretofore unseen sister, Allysa, eager for a day gig and more importantly, a new best friend. Before long, Lily and Allysa are inseparable. Almost as quickly, Ryle re-enters Lily’s life, refusing to take no for an answer. Eventually, Ryle’s needy insistence wins over Lily and their montage-heavy romance begins, setting the stage for It Ends With Us ’s central plot development: Despite Lily’s unconditional love for Ryle, his possessive nature, not to mention his jealousy when Lily’s high-school flame-turned-restaurant-owner, Atlas Corrigan (Brandon Sklenar), reappears and threatens to upend their superficially stable life.
One “accident” turns into two; two “accidents” turn into three and It Ends With Us faces its largest conundrum: Turning what appeared to be a standard-issue, mid-budget romance and its implicit happily ever after into an anti-romance centred on Lily’s not-quite-literal rebirth as a strong(er), independent woman. A chance to define for herself what she wants and doesn’t want from a relationship, what she’ll tolerate, what limits she’ll set for herself and others, and ultimately, what constitutes an actual dealbreaker(s).
It Ends with Us clumsily jumps from present-day Lily to her teenaged counterpart (ably played by Isabela Ferrer) and a teen Atlas (Alex Neustaedter), the high-school romance fated — less by circumstance than authorial intervention — to end badly. How “badly” isn’t clear, though their meet-up as adults suggests a whole shedloads’s worth of conflicted, unreconciled feelings, suggesting that Ryle’s jealousy isn’t completely inside his head, but perhaps something he puts out into the world and thus, helps to bring into being.
Too often, though, It Ends With Us offers uncomfortably thin rationalizations for Ryle’s behaviour, from jealousy to his anger and the “accidents” that drive a wedge between Ryle and Lily. To the adaptation’s slight credit, Ryle isn’t a monster, but he’s also far from worthy, let alone mature or self-aware enough, to merit consideration as Lily’s lifelong/lifetime partner. If anything, he’s a man-sized obstacle to Lily’s self-actualization.
After more than two hours, It Ends With Us gets to that self-actualization, but it’s difficult to shake the feeling that it could have gotten there much faster and more meaningfully. Sometimes, a faithful adaptation — credited to Christy Hall here — should have been something else altogether, an adaptation attuned to the pluses and minuses of the cinematic art form and all that implies. At least, though, the fashion-conscious Lively gets to wear some of the best fits of her onscreen career. She even delivers a reasonably persuasive performance, a performance undermined less by her talent than the source material.
It Ends With Us opens theatrically on Friday, August 9.
