Women’s pictures, weepies, domestic dramas, melodramas: The name has changed depending on the era, but it’s been a forceful genre since cinema started. Often exaggerated but always rooted in emotional realism, these are films that center women and treat as foundational truth that the things that worry them – love, work, parenting, the tension between all three, the ways society wants to box them in (also: lots of terminal illness) – are all worthy concerns for the big screen. In their Golden Age of Hollywood heyday, they made stars out of Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Lana Turner, and turned directors like Douglas Sirk and Max Ophüls into if-you-know-you-know figures of adulation for film majors.
These days, stories with these kinds of priorities in mind – films like The Idea of You and Float, the Netflix miniseries From Scratch – have mostly been shunted to streaming, presumably because studios have lost confidence in their ability to draw audiences to the multiplex. On the other hand, none of those properties had a Colleen Hoover fanbase built in. A Texas writer who went from self-published to 20-million-books-sold-and-counting phenomenon in the blink of an eye, Hoover’s most popular novel, It Ends With Us, is currently #1 on the The New York Times bestseller list, despite being published nearly a decade ago. If anybody’s going to fill movie theatre seats for a weepie, it’s her.
Her readers will be better prepared for this film version (adapted by Christy Hall), which takes a long time, by design, to arrive at what it is “about.” (The trailer spells it out, and the title, intimating a cycle to be broken, is a dead giveaway, but still, consider yourself warned: plot details ahead.) Blake Lively, who also produces, stars as Lily Bloom, a Boston-based florist who falls in love with a neurosurgeon named Ryle Kincaid (played by Jane the Virgin’s Justin Baldoni, who also directs). Their courtship is swift, their connection intense; in contrast to the skittishness about sex in most movies right now (see: the internet loses its mind when Twisters couldn’t muster one crummy kiss), It Ends With Us is very upfront with how horny Lily and Ryle are for each other.
And that matters. Not for prurient reasons, per se, but because the film is taking the time to build a relationship. Because domestic abuse doesn’t begin on a first date, before you’re in too deep – and abuse is where the film is headed. In retrospect, that’s where it starts, at the funeral of an abuser, and it’s present throughout, in flashbacks as Lily recalls falling in love with the boy next door and the abuse he suffered. (This first love, played as an adult by 1923’s Brandon Sklenar, is named Atlas Corrigan, by the way, completing It Ends With Us’ triple lutz of goofy character names.) The emergence of violence in Lily’s relationship with Ryle appears slowly and from a distinct perspective – one that will shift later in the film, in a revelatory sequence.
It Ends With Us pours most of its nuance into the beginning, middle, and harrowing climax of its central relationship. The film’s bookends, its picture of Lily before and after, is not as skillful; book readers will have better luck making sense of some of the plot’s vaguenesses. And Lily’s aggressively in fashion, Nineties-homage styling – oversized blazers, an abundance of leather, cropped tanks (the kind, wincingly, we used to call wife beaters, a weird touch) – is a befuddling choice. Still, if anybody’s going to pull it off, it’s Lively. She has a limited range: She can play playful, playfully stern, twinkingly sad-eyed; even when she’s striving for tough, as in The Town, there’s just no dampening her sparkle. Shrug. Range is overrated. Lively has presence. Those Golden Age of Hollywood heroines? She’d fit right in.
This article appears in August 9 • 2024.
