It Ends with Us

Some books should remain books, they don’t need to be made into movies. Of all the great novels that are optioned to become films, so very few actually get made. And of the ones that do get made, even fewer are actually worth the time. Clocking in at an almost excruciating two hours and ten minutes we have Justin Baldoni pulling double-duty as lead male actor and director with Blake Lively in It Ends With Us. Only as we now know, it doesn’t end with them as the pair are drawing battle lines in a developing legal dispute for this movie of all things and we’re constantly reminded about it in the press. 

We first meet Lily Bloom (Lively) as she travels home to scenic small-town Maine for her father’s funeral. A florist by trade (thus her name “Lily Bloom,” get it?), Lily helps her mother select the flowers for her father and to deliver a eulogy but in the moment she chokes under the weighted memories of her father harming her mother. Returning to Boston, she meets charming neurosurgeon Riley Kincaid (Baldoni) on a rooftop set that looks like it was stolen from The Room. Their interrupted faux-meet cute works out because he's actually the brother of her new florist shop employee/bestie Allyssa (Jenny Slate). At the hip new chic restaurant Root (Root…Lily…Bloom…flowers... get it?) Lily aims to get to know Riley a little better but she inadvertently reconnects with her high school boyfriend Atlas Corrigan (Brandon Skelner) who owns the joint. But the perpetually jelly Riley is none-too-pleased, and his rage builds. As Lily gets closer to Riley she comes face to fist with his dark history of anger issues and the cycle of abuse that marred her childhood continues. 

I wasn’t being flippant in my introduction when describing It Ends With Us as a Lifetime movie plot dressed in the trappings of a Hallmark flick. We have a serious storyline of familial and spousal abuse and that horrible perpetuating cycle gussied up in this spotless inauthentic veneer of impossible perfection. Everyone is beautiful. Everything is beautiful. Even the abusive acts and outcomes are inauthentically beautiful. The entire look and feel of the production and the plot beats have been Pasteurized to perfection. Was it like this in the book? I wouldn’t know, didn’t read it.

Even without reading the novel and knowing that it came from the seemingly ongoing series from author Colleen Hoover, this adaptation is a whiff. There are little moments, character actions, and phrasing that would have weight and meaning if we were reading it on the printed page (or Kindle or audiobook if that's your deal). There’s a weight to that sort of internal monologue or the ethereal knowledge of reading that just isn’t translated here. I don’t know if that’s because of Christy Hall’s screenplay or Baldoni’s direction or both, but It Ends With Us does things seemingly because the novel did them but not in a way that translates into an interesting or believable film. 

And that extends down to the chemistry-free performances of our leads Baldoni and Lively. There’s very little about these two and how they carry their characters that offer a semblance of chemistry or attraction. They meet and date and marry because that’s what the story tells them to do.  And that just makes the eventual abuse sequences all the weirder because those moments really are the only time these two are remotely convincing together. Maybe that’s why we’re enduring their protracted legal dispute. I can at least say that the supporting cast of Jenny Slate, Brandon Skelnar, Hasan Minhaj, Kevin McKidd, Amy Morton, and the young actors playing our leads as teenagers showed up for work and did their jobs well. You can see the support crew trying to mine some depth with the material they were given but the film is frustratingly not about them. But what if it was? What if the film had been about friends and family affected by the abusive relationship of two people they dearly love? That might have been worth exploring because abuse isn't a two-way explosion, it pulls in and harms everyone in the blast radius. 

Make no mistake, It Ends With Us is thematically important, but the film itself is a whiff. Abuse cycles whether stemming from alcoholic parents, sexual partners, or childhood trauma - it’s a charged, sensitive and important topic. This film bundles those themes into a pretty-looking Christmas ornament. It’s a trite, inauthentic, cliched piece of work pretending it’s earnestly examining a relevant theme with two actors who clearly do not want to be in the same room together. Some books just shouldn’t be movies… or at least if they're going to be movies they should be made by someone who can convincingly make it work.

Vital Disc Stats: The Blu-ray 
It Ends With Us seemingly ends its home video disc run at 1080p for a single disc Blu-ray + Digital release from Sony. Pressed on a Region Free BD50 disc, the disc is housed in a standard Blu-ray case with identical slipcover artwork. The disc loads to a series of other heavy-handed dramas and thrillers produced by Sony before arriving at a static image main menu.

The 1080p 2.39:1 transfer is effectively flawless. Details are razor sharp, with fine details in facial features, costume, and set design apparent throughout. Colors are vivid and beautiful, largely thanks to the abundance of flowers seen throughout the film. Black levels are nice diving deep into that desired inky territory with a great sense of depth. Cinematographer Barry Peterson at least understood the assignment that visually the aesthetics and color nuances should shift as the tone of the story changes, so on that level, the film succeeds.

The film is presented with an effective enough DTS-HD MA 5.1 track. I say “effective” because while it does check a lot of the boxes of what a nice surround track should deliver, I’m just not wholly impressed by it. It’s a good audio mix, dialog is clean, the scoring is sufficient, and surrounds are engaged well for the busier scenes, but I wouldn’t call it “immersive” or anything like that. I felt a lot of the audio work had a lot of filler elements. Things that made the surrounds active not because the scene needed it but more that these elements were just there. Did we need the sweeping orchestration of Lily’s return home and the fraught first conversation with her mother? Not really, but the score from Dunkin Blickenstaff and Rob Simonsen is there and it sounds good. 

Maybe Sony saw the writing on the wall with the current legal battle between our stars and just wanted to avoid any involvement because there’s nothing on this disc for bonus features other than the trailers when the disc first loads. No commentary. No behind-the-scenes featurettes. Zilch. There’s already so much behind-the-scenes footage being subpoenaed by each party I can imagine Sony didn't want their disc entered into evidence.

And here we are, the reason we’re inundated with constant updates about a stupid legal battle of he-said-she-said between two relatively mediocre talents. It Ends With Us. Keep that in mind when you see those headlines. This upcoming trial with each party suing the other for hundreds of millions of dollars is for this movie. Two people who can’t settle their personal crap with each other all over a film where they couldn’t convincingly deliver an earnest and true cinematic drama about the harmful cyclical nature of abuse. Somehow, through it all, It Ends With Us was a box office smash and earned hundreds of millions of dollars at the global box office. Lively and Baldoni should have been grateful to get their box office bonus pay and gone home. 

Now that I’ve finally seen what this fight is all about, I’m more embarrassed for them than ever. The novel and its sequel might be some kind of a literary phenomenon and those books could well have made for a good series of movies, but as is It Ends With Us isn’t a good movie. But, if you’re so inclined, I have to admit the Blu-ray does its job by delivering a suitable video transfer and a nice audio track even if there is a massive void where juicy and interesting bonus features should rest. For that odd fan out there or the mass of cinematic masochists, It Ends With Us on Blu-ray is Worth A Look if for no other reason than to see what the legal hoopla is all about.