A movie or book can address a serious, emotionally wrenching subject and still be a thing you can’t help snickering at, a dramatic pileup that leaves you muttering “Oh, come on!” under your breath. , the film adaptation of ’s ferociously popular 2016 novel, works hard to ping all the appropriate notes. This is after all, a story of domestic abuse, a more widely shared experience in real life than most of us want to face up to. (Hoover has said that the book was inspired by her mother, who was physically abused by Hoover’s father.) And the objective reality is that we need movies like It Ends With Us. The classic genre known as the woman’s film—pictures like King Vidor’s 1937 Stella Dallas, or either version of Imitation of Life, filmed first by John Stahl in 1934 and later, in 1959, by Douglas Sirk—thrived in the ’30s, ’40s, and beyond by carving out a . Women, and sometimes men, often need to cry it all out, and aren’t the movies—a refuge in the dark—the perfect place to do that?
But It Ends With Us—directed by Justin Baldoni, who also co-stars—doesn’t have the mojo to get the waterworks pumping, not even in a gentle, reserved way. stars as the kookily named Lily Bloom, a thoughtful young woman with a hippie-patchwork wardrobe and a guardedly bright outlook on life. She lives in Boston; she’s about to open her own flower shop, the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. In all ways, this is a period of transition. Her father has just died, and she’s not sure what to do with her mixed feelings; as we learn more about the way he abused Lily’s mother, and others, we understand why. Lily has just returned from the funeral, held in her Maine hometown, and with her jumbled thoughts, she has stolen away to a Boston rooftop with a dreamy view. But she doesn’t actually live in the building. And when a handsome neurosurgeon, who is a resident, blusters his way onto that rooftop, you get the sense her life will be changed forever.
His name is Ryle Kincaid—he’s played by Baldoni—and he’s almost criminally handsome, with his sympathetic dark eyes and 10 o’clock shadow, even sexier than the 5 o’clock kind. He’s just got to be a wolf in wolf’s clothing, and in the first minutes of their meeting, it sure seems that way. The two find themselves engaged in the kind of disarmingly frank conversation that can often brew between strangers. He’s had a terrible day; she’s just lost her father, a man she loved despite the fact he might not have deserved it. Ryle listens to her, but he also tells her, “I want to have sex with you,” clearly taken with her haute-hippie-girl breeziness, which glows even through her conflicted grief. And though she calls him out, rightly, on his perhaps overly direct sales pitch, they almost do sleep together—until he’s called away to work. Because a handsome neurosurgeon’s work is never done.
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