BookTok Fav ‘It Ends With Us’ Adaptation Doesn’t Fully Bloom, but Tactfully Gets the Message Across
3/5 flowers
For the most part, the screen adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s romance novel It Ends With Us tackles abusive relationships superficially. Yet the Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni, and Brandon Sklenar starrer, which Baldoni also directs, is still an attractive, tactful, pertinent little film on the subject, one you hope grabs as many eyeballs as the novel did on BookTok and Bookstagram.
Having already resisted the explosive social media buzz around this 2016 novel in 2021, I chose to continue holding out on reading the book before watching the movie; a rare feat for little old me. One of the few things I did know about the book was the ridiculous names of its protagonists—Lily Bloom Blossom (Lively), Ryle Kincaid (Baldoni), and Atlas Corrigan (Sklenar). So when the film began with a meet-cute that mocked these names in a self-aware sort of way, it endeared itself to me instantly.
Lily Bloom meets Ryle Kincaid on the rooftop of his apartment building, which she snuck onto for the view. Lily’s fresh off her father’s funeral where she couldn’t get the eulogy out, indicating that they had a strained relationship. Ryle storms through the door, dealing with evident anger issues of his own. There’s palpable chemistry as the two flirt and discover they are wildly different people. Lily is opening a flower shop and is a relationship gal. Ryle is a rich neurosurgeon and a classic f*ckboy. But they do have lust in common.
Even though their rooftop encounter doesn’t go all the way, when they bump into each other at Lily’s flower shop where Ryle’s sister Allysa (a hilarious Jenny Slate) happens to start working, their relationship quickly… blossoms. You’re goofily smiling at the screen watching Lily and Ryle on fun double dates with Allysa and her husband Marshall (a barely-there but familiar Hasan Minhaj) until the underlying toxicity in Ryle’s love-bombing, pressurizing, and subtle manipulation hits you like a flower slowly shedding petals to reveal what’s at its center. But it’s too late; they’re now married.
Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni are both extremely attractive people with charm cranked up to the max for the romantic bits, the banter, and the intimate scenes. There’s a self-assuredness to their characters that adds to their sex appeal, reminiscent of their iconic TV personas, Serena Van Der Woodsen from Gossip Girl and Rafael Solano from Jane the Virgin.
The “blossoming” of Lily and Ryle’s relationship is effectively intercut (editing by Oona Flaherty and Rob Sullivan) with scenes from Lily’s teenage years when she met and fell in love with Atlas, who ran away from his mother’s abusive relationships at home, a feeling that wasn’t unknown to Lily herself. The casting for young Lily is incredibly on point; Isabella Ferrer looks and sounds exactly like a young Lively would. The scenes between her and Alex Neustaedter as Atlas are as warm and sweet as young love would feel. When Sklenar takes over as older Atlas, the chemistry with Lively’s Lily picks up just as easily, making you wish the two had more scenes than we got in the film (there’s a sequel novel, though, so … who knows?).
I can’t quite describe it, but watching this first half of It Ends With Us is like walking in the park during autumn, wrapped up in a cozy woolen scarf. It could be the warm, pumpkin-spice color palette of the flashbacks, or the fall aesthetic of Lily Bloom’s (the flower shop that Lily opens) which looks a lot like the vintage curio shop of your Pinterest dreams that would sell dried flowers and old books. It might even be Lily’s eccentric-sexy outfits, which give off a similar vibe. What’s more, cinematographer Barry Peterson knows just how to take advantage of all these beautiful people and settings at his disposal, with close-ups that reel you in and take your breath away.
So when the other shoe drops on this too-good-to-be-true montage of warm, buttery happiness that is Lily and Ryle’s life, it’s like someone turned the heat up to stifling. The scenes of abuse are shot keeping the psyche of domestic abuse survivors in mind—it’s usually a lot of blur, confusion, and disbelief mixed with shame about what happened, whose fault it was, and other details that the mind tries to repress to fit one’s belief system. The same happens with Lily; the scenes only get sharper and more in focus when the fog finally lifts and she begins accepting the truth of what is happening to her.
Blake Lively plays this Lily with great tact and conviction, even if, at times, her character feels rather one-dimensional. It’s a whiplash-like experience to watch Justin Baldoni’s turn as an abusive Ryle (IRL the man hosts a podcast that helps men reframe masculinity in a healthy, feminist manner!) But it’s a testament to his acting chops that he can bring out the complexity and nuance of this character. It’s important that he not be too flat of a character because it helps you process where Lily and Ryle’s relationship progresses once she finds out she is pregnant with his child.
‘My Tears Ricochet’ by Lively’s bestie Taylor Swift plays in the background, an excellent choice that seems custom-made for Lily’s complicated situation.
Where I felt that It Ends With Us faltered was in rushing through this second half and not spending enough time exploring Lily’s psyche as an abuse victim who falls into the same pattern as her mother, something she thought she never would. Her decisions, once realization snaps in, feel too easy and unwavering, instead of exploring any self-doubt or an introspection of how she got there in the first place. It doesn’t delve deep enough into why women stay as long as they do in abusive relationships, and why Lily was able to leave and break the cycle of generational trauma for her daughter, while her mother never could.
Barely two or three scenes touch on these themes (screenplay by Christy Hall), when there should’ve been more time spent on Lily’s friendship with Allysa (who is in a happy marriage), and the shared kinship she’d now feel with her mother that shapes a lot of who she is. I liked that Atlas wasn’t a big part of this phase of her life, because the last thing she needs is another man. Yet, since this phase passes by in a flash, when Atlas does pop up again, it feels like Lily’s jumping from one man to the next too soon.
This lack of depth made me second guess whether all the time spent establishing Ryle’s Dr. Jekyll personality in the first half should’ve instead gone to making Lily a more rounded character. Then again, I was sitting in the cinema a few seats below some men who cackled during Ryle’s jealousy of Atlas and the abruptness of Lily’s decision to move out of her marriage. It made me wonder if perhaps we do need to spell it out in the most obvious ways about men like Ryle—rich, educated, loving, family-oriented, and hot—who are capable of all this and deserve to be left by the women in their lives without so much as a second thought.
Because women aren’t rehabilitation centers for men, and that definitely ought to end with us, our generation. In that mission, Justin Baldoni’s adaptation of It Ends With Us does accomplish what it set out to do, and tactfully gets the message across. Maybe I’ll even read the book now.
It Ends With Us releases in theatres on August 9, 2024.
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