My only explanation for why I saw It Ends With Us opening weekend was that Friend was visiting for the week and when I politely suggested Didi or a Screen Unseen she said we had to see this instead and I said, I really don’t want to see that, she said WHY NOT YOU COWARD and honestly, she was right this was a perfect movie. Colleen Hoover’s adaptation is one of those brainless summer sizzlers that you can argue with children about endlessly after the fact, despite a looming controversy about the director/castmate which I have spent literally no time following after the fact (this review comes nearly two weeks after having seen the film).
The basic premise of this film is that Lily Blossom Bloom (!) is swept off her feet by a successful brain surgeon named (checks notes) Ryle and he is abusive and then she reconnects with a teenage crush named (checks again) Atlas? Sigh. I actually like the fuck you energy required to come up with these names a little bit. All the other details are sort of extraneous to this love triangle plot, but they’re fun and spoilery.
Lily Bloom’s dad Owen Hunt (from Grey’s Anatomy or Lucius Vorenus from HBO Rome) is ALSO abusive but dead, so sort of a wash there. He was rich and powerful, so much so that none of the police officers at his funeral in 2021 felt the need to wear masks because they were insulated from any and all diseases.
Lily Bloom’s wardrobe is eccentric and varied. Friend mentioned how insane it is that she wears this baggy jumpsuit really early on in the movie before later trotting out her own overall ensemble that was definitely inspired by the Lively look. In every scene she is incredibly well-dressed, to the point of wondering where this girl is getting all this money from when she’s just dropped some serious coin to open a flower shop in Boston that even her own mother is worried about succeeding financially. I get that the money is probably just ancestral wealth that she’s drawing on or maybe she’s kept it all in good condition for a long time, but it really does so much to elevate this movie from a melodrama to a magical realist story about a girl with a magical wardrobe who goes to Boston to sell flowers at the incredibly expensive or stupidly cheap price of $51 per arrangement. Her friend Jenny Slate (Allyson) is also an impossibly wealthy woman who works “because she’s bored,” which makes her more of a joke-dispensing nymph who haunts the store more than an actual character, which is totally fine. Jenny Slate’s husband is, annoyingly, Hasan Minhaj playing the EXACT SAME CHARACTER he plays in that motherhood comedy from not two months ago (the peppy, uncomplicated, nonthreatening husband-dad).
Speaking of Babes, It Ends With Us seems like another candidate for storyline that would’ve resulted in a sensible abortion if it had taken place in the real world rather than the mind of Colleen Hoover. Given the choice between raising your abuser’s baby alone and literally any other options, it seems not hard at all to see how she could’ve terminated her pregnancy and tried again with Atlas in a year or ten without any issues. The mere fact that she is weirdly squeaky clean when it comes to interacting with any and all other single men in this movie makes the film even more magical realist. The idea that after having been helped by Atlas that she would then cease contact from him for a year or years seems to defy the logic of any real relationship and even the internal logic of the two of them, but there’s this weird fixation with flash forwards in romances right now (see The Idea of You from earlier this year). It’s just one of the few things that makes Ryle seem a little extra in the way that he’s so domineering and paranoid and insecure about Lily Bloom cheating on him.
About the abuse itself. One of the kind of cool things about the way that this film deals with the slow and insidious creep of abuse in the relationship is by portraying it Roshomon-style, in the focalized perspective of the abuser. The first instance is–intentionally–visually difficult to read as abuse as are a lot of the other instances later in the film, which makes their steam-valve fights seem like a natural, normal high-stress relationship between two totally equal parties in every way–a neurosurgeon with the penthouse apartment and his impossibly fashionable florist girlfriend who definitely doesn’t make as much money as he does. Ryle is portrayed in a complex and thoughtful way that makes his character compelling and the maturation of their relationship fraught and freighted. At every moment that Justin Baldoni is on screen it is obvious to me that he should’ve been cast as Johnathan Bailey from Bridgerton.
This movie made more than Borderlands in their joint opening weekend, which I think says a lot more about Borderlands piss poor performance than anything, but I still am amazed by how much this stupid film with its amazing soundtrack at no point made me bored.
