Every so often, the theatrical spotlight makes way for a film whose more diegetic marketing takes a backseat to the real-world drama that took place behind the scenes. These developments are always unfortunate and equally inevitable, given the public fascination with celebrities.
Two years ago it was Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling, and this year it was Justin Baldoni’s It Ends with Us — the highly-anticipated adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s sensational romance novel that scored $350 million against a $25 million production budget. That victory was offset by aforementioned rumors of clashing between Baldoni and lead Blake Lively (who was also contending with a vacuum of controversy just on her own) and a divided critical reception, but victory number two has come in the form of streaming glory.
Per FlixPatrol, It Ends with Us has soared to the top of the United States’ worldwide Netflix film rankings at the time of writing, decisively outperforming the likes of Subservience — the sci-fi thriller that questionably stars Megan Fox as a homicidal, lustful robot — in second place, and Mary — the dramatically inconsequential rendering of the story of Jesus’ mother — in fourth place.
It Ends with Us stars Lively as Lily Bloom, a florist who opens a shop in Boston, and who begins a relationship with one Ryle Kincaid (Baldoni), a neurosurgeon who becomes markedly infatuated with her shortly after meeting her. She also runs into Atlas Corrigan (Brandon Sklenar), a restaurant owner and Lily’s high school sweetheart. Lily vowed some time ago that she would never end up like her mother, who was constantly abused by her now-deceased father, but when Ryle’s rage issues work themselves into their relationship, Lily soon finds herself in an emotionally devastating and physically dangerous situation.
When a film deals with subject matter like domestic violence, the most important line it needs to walk is the emotional one. Bonus points if all the technical fundamentals of cinematic storytelling are top-notch, but the make-or-break in narratives like these is nailing those empathetic beats.
In this way, It Ends with Us is fantastic. The film never once excuses Ryle’s behavior, but it’s also careful to present that behavior as symptomatic of a much larger, underlying tragedy, as most all behaviors like Ryle’s are. It Ends with Us, then, is at once a proponent of radical love, one that teaches us to love one another in hopes of separating the person from their destructive pain, but also in a way that doesn’t put ourselves in the crosshairs of that destruction.
The two key bulwarks of this emotional core are Baldoni’s direction, which brilliantly frames the domestic violence in a way that plays tricks on the mind (as such abuse so often does), and Lively’s decisively humanist approach to her performance as Lily. Her pain is channeled by the actress just as loudly as her joy, and her deep capacity for both of these things speaks directly to the complex emotional ground that It Ends with Us makes a successful mission out of.
Published: Dec 11, 2024 10:03 am