It Ends With Us | Review

★★

To give credit where due, It Ends With Us knows its likely audience. Or, rather, it knows exactly which quadrant in the four square it’s interested in and makes no bones about the chase. Based on the bestselling novel by self-publishing sensation Colleen Hoover, the film shoots from the hip in search of wildly underserved female filmgoers. This as Deadpool lops arms off in the screen next door – which is not to say Swifties don’t love Marvel too. Where that film scored massacres to Madonna, however, It Ends With Us tailors to Taylor. It’s a glossy and endlessly Instagrammable affair, with floral imagery and synthy soundtrack ballads deployed to almost parodic effect. Real life is messy, It Ends With Us is anything but.

Set in a perpetually autumnal Boston, the film paints from an auburn colour palette, each frame shot in gorgeous synchronicity with the auburn aesthetic of Blake Lively, who leads as wistful florist Lily Bloom. The film is directed by Justin Baldoni in only his third effort after the similarly cloying Clouds and Five Feet Apart. He stars too, playing the darkly handsome Ryle Kincaid. Already, a sense for the arch and textual is apparent. A viewer entering blind would face little difficulty in guessing the film’s literary origins. An adapting script by Daddio’s Christy Hall hasn’t quite the nous to retool Hoover’s dialogue for the natural ear. Nobody in real life says things like ‘I’m an innately happy person’ or ‘we all have an idea of what love can be’.

No more likely is a rooftop meet cute, under a dusky night sky, in which total strangers enter into immediate repartee and begin revealing to the other wild and intimate secrets. Or, the very next day, Ryle’s manic pixie sister spontaneously walking into Lily’s wreck of a new shop and asking for a job, even though she hates flowers. Such individuals would surely be entirely insufferable in real life and feel inconceivable outwit the Richard and Judy book club. The appeal – all limitless wealth and sexy dinner parties – is obvious but an odd stylistic establishment for the heavy themes to come. Naturalism is an uneasy bedfellow for bougie soap opera.

Flashbacks reveal a past of two halves for Lily. An abusive father and the soulful first love she hides from him. This is Atlas Corrigan, a fellow victim of domestic abuse, who grows up to become a lumberjack-chic Brandon Sklenar. In one more twist of fate, Atlas has opened an artisanal restaurant mere blocks from Lily’s shop and so is on stern hand when Ryle reveals himself more Wickham than Darcy in the ranking of eligible messieurs. The name really should have been more of a giveaway. That, and an immediately disquieting performance from Baldoni. Sklenar is softer but his Atlas serves more to guide Lily to a re-evaluation of her present through the prism of her past than to stir the passions.

To this end, the film recalls Jean-Marc Vallée’s HBO adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s ‘Sharp Objects’ – and not solely owing to the visual similarities between Lively here and Amy Adams there. It Ends With Us hasn’t quite the incisive darkness of that series and so can’t match the punch. Broader strokes strive for bigger, easier emotions. The message of empowerment has more power than sincerity. And yet, in the burning of its final embers, the film unearths a late act instance of real impact. Lively guides us through this momentary enlightenment with an embrace of emotional honesty. Throughout, even as cliches and clunks roll the eye, hers is a performance generous in heart.

What’s impressive, therein, is Lively’s capacity to achieve this, even as her character proves the least compelling in the film. Without the high dramatic flaws of her male counterparts or the zany force of nature materialised by her closest friend – Jenny Slate’s Allysa – Lily simply exists, a conduit to the vital point. The actions of others do not a woman make and it’s not enough to round her humanity. More so than any other in the film, Lily epitomises the shallow reality of the world on display. Attractive, emotive and warm but cut and arranged like the proverbial flower; which is to say, not really alive.