Lily Bloom and Riley Kincaid don’t exactly have a good meeting. On a rooftop in Boston, he announces himself by kicking a patio chair in anger. She’s there trying to come to terms with the death of her abusive father. They talk about maraschino cherries, gun violence, and flirt. There’s something off about this pair. But there’s also an obvious attraction.
So begins the uneven film adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s best-selling 2016 novel “It Ends With Us,” starring Blake Lively, which tries to balance the realities of domestic violence within a romantic comedy and a female-empowerment film. Everyone suffers in the process.
The play is too close to melodrama, with suicide, homelessness, generational suffering, child murder, unwanted pregnancy and unforgettable love all depicted and only half-digested. Set in Boston, it doesn’t get anywhere close to the flavor of that city.
The film centers on Lively’s Lily, a flower shop owner who finds herself in the middle of a complicated love triangle between charming neurosurgeon Ryle — Justin Baldoni, who also directs — and her charming high school boyfriend, Atlas, played beautifully by Brandon Sklenar.
There are red flags about Ryle, but they don’t become apparent until they’re pieced together, which literally takes years. The filmmakers should be given credit for not making it too easy to wave a red flag at a potential abuser.
The most powerful thing about “It Ends With Us” is the consequences of domestic violence and how they haunt those who witness it or those who survive it. This could have been presented better or given more emphasis.
Baldoni strikes a fine balance of menace and charm, operating in the zone between assertive and psychopathic. And his direction is good, with an ability to quickly summarize scenes and advance the plot elegantly, though he is fond of too many music-based montages.
Lively is fine here, veering dangerously close to the Manic Pixie Dream Girl with her dainty floral sketches and love of shabby chic, but she ends up being even better. She wears a lot of rings and a lot of flowers, but she can still stun an entire room in a cut-out dress.
Christy Hall’s screenplay has some pretty cheesy stuff — “This guy goes after women like candy,” someone says at one point — but works well around the book’s odd spots, like making Lily’s father’s funeral a flashback rather than an awkward reconstruction on the rooftop.
But “It Ends With Us” doesn’t end quickly enough — dragging on for more than two hours — with disorienting and poor editing, such as abruptly cutting away to scenes, leaving viewers to figure out where they are.
And we have so many questions, like how Lively’s character got to the roof of that posh high-rise building. And what happened to Lively’s best friend – Jenny Slate, who is clearly the heroine of the movie – who wears Valentino dresses and carries a purse that costs as much as a small car? She clearly doesn’t need a retail job but still works at the flower shop?
And why is there this weird association with Carhartt – look at the copycat logos appearing and disappearing from jackets and jumpsuits – apparently an attempt to show that the people wearing them are practical working class people, when in fact they are not.
The film’s portrayal of wealth and luxury – from the Mercedes to the million-dollar apartments and fancy dinner reservations – I think is an attempt to show that domestic violence isn’t just confined to sports bars and factories.
The funniest thing is that Lily has a type: both of her lovers are dark-haired, strong men who like to wear tight black T-shirts, have short beards and love her. When they fight – and they do fight – it’s really hard to tell them apart.
The blistering soundtrack — which includes Thom Yorke’s “Dawn Chorus,” Lewis Capaldi’s “Love the Hell Out of You” and Brittany Howard’s “I Don’t” — features the undeniable presence of Lively’s bestie Taylor Swift, who lent her “My Tears Ricochet.”
When Lily and Ryle finally meet for the first time, she warns him: “Don’t make me regret this.” Of course, she will. And some of the other people who are a part of this movie probably will, too.
Mark Kennedy is at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits
Sony Pictures’ “It Ends With Us” will be released in theaters on Friday. It is rated PG-13 for “domestic violence, sexual content and some strong language.” Film duration: 130 minutes. One and a half stars out of four.
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