I have never seen a Hallmark movie, watched more than 10 consecutive minutes of a soap opera, nor read a single word written by Colleen Hoover, the romance author whose works have sold over 20 million copies. And, having now experienced the summer blockbuster It Ends with Us, one of the surprise box-office successes of the year, I know I will never have to.
Based on Hoover’s bestselling romance novel from 2016, the screen version of It Ends with Us embodies all of the characteristics commonly associated with the various forms from which it springs or to which it owes a debt: cardboard characterizations, dumb dialogue, and dramatic demonstrations of girl power. Yet the movie’s most salient quality is not its schmaltz but its palpable sense of providence. Like any good soap opera, this is a movie in which extraordinarily unlikely things happen with remarkable regularity. Strangers meet, lose contact, and then find each other again. A couple falls in love, separates, and then is reunited again — in a hip restaurant of all places. On top of everything else, is there anything more improbable than a fictional universe in which the three main characters are named Lily, Ryle, and Atlas?
As lovers of French farce know, there is nothing inherently wrong with constructing a narrative that depends on coincidence. But this is not a French farce. In the case of It Ends with Us, the assorted twists of fate work to underscore the narcissism at its core: an incredible series of far-fetched things happen for the sole purpose of allegedly furthering the personal growth of the heroine, Lily Bloom (Blake Lively). Even worse, the world of the film seems to exist only to give meaning to Lily’s past trauma, and characters emerge only so that she might reckon with — deal with — that past trauma. Despite its emotional hysterics, this film has a strictly utilitarian notion of storytelling.
Not that it isn’t nice to look at in that gloppy Hallmark manner: The film opens with scenic shots of Lily traveling through a cozy, autumn-flecked hamlet on her way to her childhood home on the occasion of her father’s funeral. “I’m so glad you’re home,” Lily’s mother says in a line indicative of the script’s level of sophistication. “Me too,” Lily replies. And why shouldn’t she be? Her homestead has a Martha Stewart Living-level of elegance. Yet a history of violence lurks behind the manicured boxwood and amid the spiral staircase: Lily’s deceased father was a domestic abuser who battered her mother.
Despite this unfortunate heritage, Lily seems to have her life pretty well put together. First of all, she is played by Blake Lively. Second, she laughs easily, including at her own ridiculous name. Third, she is sufficiently unburdened by financial obligations or distress to acquire a prime piece of commercial real estate in Boston. When Lily says, “I’m obsessed with flowers, and I’m about to open my first flower shop,” the uninitiated might first assume that she is kidding. But, in fact, she is telling us exactly what she is about to do.
Yet it is an article of faith in this movie that one can never actually escape one’s victimhood, even if secondhand. Thus, the story propels Lily into the arms of one Ryle Kincaid, a neurosurgeon whose carefully maintained stubble beard should alone disqualify him from holding this job even if he was not, obviously, a hot-tempered maniac. When we first see him, he is in the process of engaging in combat with some chairs atop the swanky Boston apartment building in which he lives.
Naturally, the Hoover-based screenplay ensures that Lily and Ryle are not mere ships passing in the night: After Lily opens her shop, she encounters a wisecracking firecracker named Allysa (Jenny Slate), who claims to hate flowers even though she is seeking a job at Lily’s floristry business while wearing a floral-print coat. The topper: Allysa’s brother is Ryle, who proceeds to pursue Lily with something of the same playbook as a stalker. Smart audiences will continue to wonder about his medical bona fides. When Ryle refers to his “big surgery tomorrow,” one cannot be sure whether this is a procedure Ryle is scheduled to perform or one he is scheduled to undertake, like, perhaps, a lobotomy. Ryle is played by Justin Baldoni, whose amazingly obvious and dumb performance is all the more alarming since he is also the film’s director.
But wait, there’s more: When Lily and Ryle take Lily’s mother out to dinner, they select the one restaurant in Boston run by Atlas Corrigan (Brandon Sklenar), the grown-up, ruggedly unshaven, unexpectedly successful version of a formerly homeless boy whose adolescent romance with Lily is depicted in a series of excruciating flashbacks that reveal that he, too, is a victim of abuse. (Lily identifies the adult Atlas by spotting a scar on his hand.) In one such flashback, the teenage Atlas is immediately shown by the filmmakers to be unthreateningly kind because he bakes cookies while hanging out at his girlfriend’s house.
In something like the chicklit variant of the eternal return, Lily is presented as being open to Ryle’s advances as a subconscious recreation of her mother’s relationship with her abusive father — a recreation that is fully realized once Ryle’s aggression leads to actual physical altercations and injuries. Left unanswered is why a spunky, overalls-wearing young businesswoman like Lily would carry on with the unshaven oaf Ryle when she could easily, quickly, sensibly reignite a relationship with the unshaven good guy Atlas. We are forced to endure further revelations about Ryle’s true nature and a pregnancy before it all gets sorted out.
If a being from another planet saw this movie, he, she, or it would conclude that the human species is, above all, preoccupied with two things: making its own victimhood central to its identity and the creation of floral arrangements. It Ends with Us has all the appearances of being about its heroine’s freedom and independence, but the movie goes to great, indeed absurd, lengths to engineer a scenario that assures that her parents’ legacy of abuse is the defining feature of her own life. Here is a movie that shows us completely unbelievable situations and behavior and then asks us to believe in the sincerity of its message. In a depressing development, this laughably bad movie’s box-office success tells us there is an audience all too willing to buy in to the idea that there are evil, abusive men around every corner and that even being Blake Lively is not enough to elude them.
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Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.