I Saw It Ends With Us
...and I have as many thoughts as Lily Bloom has oversized jackets
Note: This post discusses domestic violence and spoils the entire plot of It Ends With Us.
As soon as my son started back to school, I indulged in one of my favorite treats: a weekday morning movie. Sure, we saw plenty of kids movies during the summer, but children famously do not care to see film adaptations of mega-successful Colleen Hoover books. And that’s what I knew I wanted to see…It Ends With Us, the film that wishes it had the dramatic backstory of Don’t Worry Darling (instead it has a slow drip of vaguely scandalous PR-fed stories). It Ends With Us has been a lightning rod for controversy, much like the book it was based on. Although I have read the book, I won’t be going into it too much here. Instead, let’s focus on the film, which…I liked. I’m never really interested in trashing anything here, nor do I feel like that’s interesting to read. I prefer to watch things that are simultaneously enjoyable while also featuring tons of tiny, inexplicable details that I can make fun of. Hence this newsletter!
Of course, it’s hard to talk about It Ends With Us because its subject matter is desperately important. Does the film always treat that subject matter with importance? Well, more on that later. But, frankly, I don’t want to sit around making fun of a film that deals with something many of you have probably experienced. Nor do I want to put it on a pedestal simply because of its subject matter. And now I understand the dilemma Blake Lively has faced while promoting this movie! Maybe I should just start talking about how Ryan Reynolds wrote a scene and showing off my floral outfits, too!
Perhaps it’s odd that the Domestic Violence Thriller is a genre unto itself, given that there’s nothing inherently thrilling about trying to get away from a controlling/abusive man. But that’s often how abusive relationships are portrayed in cinema. Take, for example, one of my all-time favorites: Sleeping With the Enemy. That film is not a look at how women get into abusive relationships nor is it a nuanced look at how women can break the cycle1. The husband sucks from the minute we see him on screen. He looks like Scary Father John Misty and the whole film is about him hunting Julia Roberts down while she tries to live out a Hallmark movie with a theater professor in a small town. It’s a deeply unserious film, and it’s campy.
It Ends With Us, meanwhile…well, there were certainly parts where I thought to myself, “this is camp.” Namely any given outfit Blake Lively was wearing. But it wasn’t a thriller, nor was it a romance. I’ve seen pieces calling it a women’s picture, and while it may seem like a stretch to compare Justin Baldoni to Douglas Sirk, that actually seems like an apt comparison to me. This is a movie about one woman and her journey and it’s melodramatic as hell.
But you know what? Let’s not waste any more time. Let’s get into the plot. Blake Lively plays Lily Bloom and she’s opening a flower shop. If that one sentence turned you off, then don’t proceed further. If you’re intrigued…let’s continue. Her abusive father just died and she has to give a eulogy that she has a hard time writing, on account of her memories of him are mostly negative. Her mom is like, “just write down five things you loved about him.” We see Lily in front of the church, looking down at her little napkin where she’s only written down the numbers one through five. She’s got nothing! She cannot vamp her way through this one (she’s like Lorelai in A Year in the Life at her dad’s funeral) and ends up stomping out of the church and escaping to her happy place: a random city rooftop on an apartment building she does not live in. Ladies, you know when you’re feeling bad and you just break into a building and climb up to the roof?
Anyway, she’s sitting precariously on the roof’s ledge when a man bursts on the scene, dramatically flailing around like one of those car dealership inflatable guys and kicking over a chair.
His name is Ryle Kincaid (details are free) and he’s a walking red flag. Listen, if your meet cute with a man involves him kicking over a chair…do not pass go. Get off that random rooftop safely! Ryle is instantly like, “Whoa, didn’t know anyone was on this roof, also please get away from the edge because you’re making me nervous,” which is like the one normal thing he says in the entire movie. Lily’s like “Haha I don’t even live here, isn’t that crazy?” and he’s like, “…can we share our deepest secrets, because mine is that I want to have sex with you.” This is VERY close to verbatim. They also have an exchange about maraschino cherries possibly causing cancer that made me think, “ok, Douglas Sirk would never.”
Ryle’s whole thing (chair kicking, being a neurosurgeon, instantly propositioning her) is working for Lily, but it’s really not working for me. No offense to Justin Baldoni, but I had to try to appreciate that he was hot on an intellectual level because I just did not care on a physical/emotional level. Big muscles and lots of white teeth don’t matter to me…my number one celebrity crush is John Ritter, specifically as Jack Tripper on Three’s Company. Just call me Shania Twain because (guitar wail) that don’t impress me much.
Their rooftop makeout session is cut short when Ryle gets a call from the hospital (~*~just neurosurgeon things~*~) and Lily assumes she’ll never see him again. I guess she’s crossing that particular rooftop off her list of escapes.
But it’s okay, because Lily’s busy. With friends? No. She doesn’t have any of those. Other than the childhood we get frequent flashbacks to, this woman has no past. I guess she had a job prior to the flower shop but it’s not important. She has a mom who wants her to move back home and that’s it, that’s her life. But she can’t because her dream is the flower shop because her name is Lily Bloom. I can’t believe her mom keeps being like, “Wow, opening a small business is a risky endeavor.” Well then why did you name your daughter Lily Bloom??? So she could not open a flower shop called Lily Bloom’s?
Almost the literal second after Lily gets the keys to the shop, a random rich lady played by Jenny Slate shows up and she’s like, “I need a job because I’m bored!” She’s hired and she’s quirky. Between the two of them, these girls have so many wacky outfits. You know that floor is covered in glitter and sequins.
The two of them are basically like Laverne and Shirley, sisters doing it for themselves, until Jenny Slate’s brother shows up. It’s Ryle. Rooftop-chair-kicking Ryle. Lily doesn’t want to date him but he really does wear her down by just not leaving her alone at all. I’d say it’s another red flag but the man is a sentient red flag as it is.
Eventually they’re dating and she moves in with him (I think?). This is a long movie. We get a lot of flashbacks to Lily’s childhood, where…oh man, I can’t believe I forgot to mention this earlier. During Lily and Ryle’s romantic meet-terrible on the rooftop, she inexplicably tells him, after the maraschino cherry toxicity factoids but before the making out, that she lost her virginity to “a homeless man.” Lily, sweetie…I know you don’t have any friends but surely even you must know that’s too much to share. The “homeless man” was actually a fellow high school student who was squatting in the abandoned house next door. Lily’s neighborhood was very McMansion-y, so I assume there was some kind of explanation for why the house next to hers was empty and boarded up. Or maybe there wasn’t. Whatever. We’re treated to frequent looks back on Lily’s youth and her relationship with this boy, whose name is…Atlas Corrigan.
And here’s where we have to stop and address the elephant in the room: Ellen Degeneres.
You may know that Ellen played a large role in the book, where Lily’s past was told to us via journal entries. Journal entries addressed to Ellen Degeneres. As in, “Ellen, you won’t believe what happened to me today…” I don’t remember how this started, and I’m not sure it matters. Point is, girl loves Ellen, and also Lily and Atlas watch the film Finding Nemo together (if I remember correctly). This was probably the aspect of the book that people pointed out the most, and it was largely excised from the film. Sure, there are a few Easter eggs for the super fans: Lily watches Ellen’s show on TV, there’s a Finding Nemo poster in her room, we briefly see her journal. But Ellen is not a character in this movie. Perhaps that’s for the best, but I can’t help thinking about what might have been. She certainly would have made the press debacle more interesting.
Lily and Atlas lost touch after school, but she finds out he owns a restaurant in Boston (oh yes, this movie takes place in Boston). She can’t let Ryle find out, because (red flag!) he’s already quite controlling. At this point, Ryle has really conditioned her to be deferential to him, has told her a little bit of his past trauma, and has essentially made her think he’ll be broken forever if she’s even slightly mean to him. And then the physical abuse starts.
The filmmakers made some really interesting decisions about how they portrayed the violence Ryle enacts on Lily. In the book, it’s very clear what happens the first time he hits her. He burns/cuts his hand in the kitchen, she lightly makes fun of him for his mistake, and he hits her, shouting about how his hands are so important for his job (neurosurgeon, in case you forgot). It’s obvious what is happening, both to the reader and to Lily.
In the film, however, it’s not clear what happens. Everything’s blurry/in slow motion, and we can't tell if Ryle’s actions are an accident. This continues every time he hurts her…we see her falling down the stairs, but we don’t fully understand what happened. It’s only later that Lily, and we as viewers, see the full extent of these scenes. We see him hit her. We see him push her down the stairs. It takes Lily a minute to realize that he’s hurting her, and it takes us a minute too. She makes excuses for him until she can’t anymore. She even marries him.
This is what I found most successful about the film. In some ways, yes, it was goofy. Lily’s wardrobe was 95% jackets. I don’t even want to know what her Carhartt budget was. At one point, when she was sleeping over at Ryle’s, she was like, “I don’t have pajamas” and he gave her his pajamas and sexily (?) helped her put them on over her fishnets. You’re telling me this woman slept in a bra and fishnet stockings underneath billowy men’s pajamas…is this what caused the tension on set? Who insisted on keeping this unrealistic scene in? I need answers.
But in many other ways, it was nuanced in its look at the dynamic of abusive relationships. In Sleeping with the Enemy, we don’t see what made Julia Roberts marry her terrible husband. Why did she ever fall in love with him in the first place? Why was it so difficult for her to leave him? There are zero emotional ties between them, so while it is a great movie, it’s not in any way an exploration of a woman’s feelings in such a relationship. It’s a thriller, and the bad guy is her husband.
It Ends With Us, though, shows us why Lily ended up in a relationship with Ryle. She was a little bit manipulated into it, but she loved things about him…and that’s why she has a hard time believing he could hurt her. That’s why she has a hard time leaving him, not because she thinks he’ll hunt her down in another city and rearrange all the cans in her cabinet. And that, to me, is a powerful message, and maybe one that some people need to hear. Loving someone isn’t enough of a reason to stay with them. They also need to treat you well. Life would be a lot easier if all abusers were as openly monstrous as the husband from Sleeping With the Enemy, but that’s not always the case. They’re often outwardly charming.
Way back when I was in undergrad, I took a psychology class where we learned about the cycle of abuse, and our professor told us about what he called the “oh shit” moment. Basically, the abuser hurts the abused in some way (“oh shit”), elaborately apologizes, is on their best behavior, and then they hit another “oh shit” moment and the cycle continues. Except the “oh shit” moment gets worse every time. Which is exactly what this film showed: Ryle’s abuse gets gradually worse and more obvious until he attempts to sexually assault Lily in a scene that is quite harrowing.
Lily escapes to Atlas, who is an over-the-top Good Guy but I didn’t mind. If the film is earnestly exploring domestic abuse, let’s also get some escapism in the form of an unrealistically beautiful flower shop, extremely weird outfits, and a former-military-current-chef-always-supportive man. Atlas says something to the effect of, “When you’re ready to fall in love again, keep me in mind.” Basically he’s asking her to keep his application on file.
But the plot twist is that Lily is pregnant. I don’t remember if she considers not keeping the baby in the book, but the option is only alluded to briefly by Atlas in the film. She does decide to go through with the pregnancy and keeps Ryle distantly involved. In the book, I remember him being uncomfortably persistent that they get back together throughout her entire pregnancy, but the film glosses over this period. It lasts nine months but we basically get 30 seconds of Lily moodily walking while Taylor Swift’s My Tears Richochet plays (honestly, effective!).
Lily invites Ryle into the delivery room and names the baby after his brother (now there’s a whole plot line we couldn’t even get into here). And then she says, “I want a divorce.” Because, she asks him as he holds his infant daughter, if your daughter came to you and said her partner was hurting her, what would you do? What would you say? And you guys…I started crying. I found this genuinely moving, and I did not ask the two other women in the room if they agreed (yes, there were only 3 of us at an 11 am showing) but I’m willing to bet they at least teared up. Lily’s mother was abused, and she was abused, but she’s willing to do the hard thing to show her daughter that it doesn’t have to be this way. I have never been in an abusive relationship, but I know several people who have, and thinking about the things they went through and the fact that they had the courage to realize it wasn’t okay is…whew! It’s a lot! And what I think is so powerful is that a film like this (a big-budget, movie-star-movie) might have the power to actually reach someone who’s stuck in a bad situation. This isn’t a subtle movie, but it is one that could show someone that what they’re experiencing isn’t right. It isn’t love.
I don’t feel like I’ve even touched on the weirdness of this movie. There are several Lily outfits I wish I could talk about, most notably these pants that, like, turn into other pants at the top?
Honestly, this is movie that I enjoyed on multiple levels. To bring it back to Don’t Worry Darling, it feels like a movie.
It was a bit tricky to write about this one and I debated even doing it, but ultimately, I kind of had to. I had too many thoughts (the Kerry Winfrey story). Please let me know your thoughts! Perhaps it’s obvious at this point, but I don’t feel that the film romanticizes abuse, although I realize that many other people think this. I also (certainly, lol) don’t think it’s above reproach just because of its subject matter. But one thing I do know for sure: I would love it if there were more weird, women-centered, dramatic, not rom-com films in theaters. I love this kind of thing. Please don’t yell at me if you disagree with me, especially if we’ve never had an online conversation before (can you tell I’ve been writing on the internet my entire adulthood?).
That’s it for this week. See you soon. xo
I’m sure there are examples that go beyond the “man=abuser, women=abused” dynamic, but that’s all I’ve seen so that’s all I’m going to speak on here.
Thank you for the excellent summary of a movie I don't intend to see! I'm afraid even if I wanted to read the source book, now I can't, simply because I cannot accept Ryle as a real name. Did the mom write "kyle" in cursive but the Gen Z nurse couldn't read it? What kind of name is RYLE?? I can't get over it.
I read the book many years ago, but haven't watched the movie yet. The abuser will only get worse until the abused finally leaves or it's too late. My stepson's mom was m*rdered by her husband a year ago. We didn't know there was a history of DV until it was too late. Like you said, I hope this movie has an impact on someone experiencing DV who needs to see it and they're able to get out before it's too late.