IT ENDS WITH US Movie Review With Katie Walsh | Blake Lively | Colleen Hoover

Her little flower shop's in the back bay. Oh, I have a little flower shop in the back bay. Do you know how expensive that little piece of real estate would be for her to rent out? It is August, and we're getting all the August movies here at Breakfast All Day. And my fantastic friend Katie Walsh is here to talk about It Ends With Us with me. Good to see you, Katie. Hi. And I'm so thrilled that I asked you to join me because I didn't even know when I asked you to come talk about this film with me that you had also read the book. Which makes you doubly useful and helpful here today. So I look forward to all of your many, many insights. You guys subscribe because we'll get to it all here at Breakfast All Day. We'll do all of the big blockbuster-y stuff and all the little stuff too. We'll do all the Ryan Reynolds and the Blake Lively movies. They're all here. So come hang out with us. Katie, what is It Ends With Us about? We all have an idea of what love can be. I want to see you again. Now you see me. You know what I mean. Well, I was going to say, this is kind of a Ryan Reynolds movie too because there are rumors about how involved he was. And apparently he helped with some of the screenwriting. But that's an aside. It Ends With Us, yes. So this is based on a blockbuster, super popular book by Colleen Hoover. I had heard of her. I had not read any of her books. But I do like to read romance novels. So I was like, let me check this one out. It's very popular, before the movie. And it's not a very good book. It's not well written. It has some problematic, annoying quirks in its writing style. But I do think that it comes from a place of truth for Colleen Hoover because she has a note at the end about how this was based on certain stuff in her own family life and that it was a way for her to explore these characters who stay in a toxic relationship. So that is what It Ends With Us is about. Blake Lively plays a woman named Lily Bloom, who owns a flower shop in Boston. And she meets a hunky neurosurgeon named Ryle Kincaid. The names are very ridiculous. And the hunky neurosurgeon is played by Justin Baldoni. He was on Jane the Virgin. He directed Five Feet Apart. And he also directed It Ends With Us. They fall into this, you know, swoony romance in Boston where it never snows. It's always like a gorgeous spring day. I have a lot of concerns about the Boston-ish of it all. But what ends up happening is that as their relationship, which is like very passionate and sexy, develops, she runs into, at a restaurant, her high school boyfriend, whose name is Atlas Corrigan. I love the names. And he's played by Brandon Sklenar, who I had never seen before. Apparently, he was on one of the Yellowstone spinoffs. So cute. Oh, my God. He's really good at this. So cute and hunky and hot. Welcome to the stage, Brandon Sklenar. I'm very glad you're here. Anyway, runs into the ex-boyfriend from high school. They had sort of a traumatic relationship. Not traumatic. They had a good relationship, but traumatic circumstances. Her father was abusive. He was dealing with a broken home and kind of homeless. And, you know, it was very dramatic, I guess you could say. But her relationship with the neurosurgeon, Ryle, starts to escalate in terms of its volatility. And It Ends With Us is really a story about intimate partner violence and domestic violence. Like, how do you find yourself in a relationship like this? What are sort of the justifications that you make? And how do you get out of it? So it's being marketed as a love triangle film, but I think it's really more of a domestic violence story. So it's a lot, you know, I mean, in terms of the tonal shifts that it makes, in terms of the different kinds of stories it's trying to encompass, because you're right, from the beginning, that scene where Lily and Ryle first meet cute on the rooftop deck of this apartment building in Boston, like, there's tension from the beginning, because you see an intensity to him, you see a volatility to him. But then he's sexy as hell, and they have incredible banter and incredible chemistry, and like, they're beautiful, and they're flirting with each other. So within this, as you say, swoony meetup, there's this undercurrent of tension from the beginning. And so they have to do a pretty good job of establishing that inner conflict, right? And Blake Lively's very good in this, because she has to hold a lot at once. She has to be, you know, sunny and optimistic and like falling in love, and yet also have the self-possession to recognize the situation that she's in and try and find a path out of it. There's also a back and forth flashback structure to teenage Lily and teenage Atlas. The young actress playing young Blake Lively looks so much like her. It's uncanny. Isabella Ferrer. At first I was like, did they just de-age Blake Lively? And like, she sounds like her. She has a similar huskiness to her voice. And so I thought that she was really good. And those were useful glimmers into what shaped her as a young woman to make her who she is today. At the same time, I found some choices so unbelievable and so divorced from human behavior, and others were surprisingly thorny for a movie that is eventually about uplift and redemption. So it's also way too goddamn long. It's like two hours and 10 minutes long, and it has like five different endings. So that was frustrating to me. So there's such an inconsistency here, but like, she's good. Jenny Slate is really good in this because she provides like the comic relief, but also gets to have some more dramatic moments. But a lot of it I found unbelievable. You mentioned it takes place in Boston. There is no sense of place here. Aside from the thousand aerial shots of the Prudential building and people rowing on the Charles at dawn, like they shot it in New Jersey. There's no sense. Like her little flower shop's in the back bay. I have a little flower shop in the back bay. Do you know how expensive that little piece of real estate would be for her to rent out? Like, that's unbelievable. Anyway, so I like performances. I like clothes a lot. Some wacky clothes. Like what she's wearing is wacky. What Jenny Slate's wearing is chic as hell. Jenny Slate is like working at the flower shop in like a couture gown. Valentino. She's the wealthy friend. So yeah, no, but it's that fantasy, right? It's that we're in the real world, but we're not in the real world. Like the weather's always good. All the men are hunky. Everyone's wearing fabulous clothes. Like it's that escapist fantasy that you get from a romantic melodrama, but then it's also the harsh reality of an abusive relationship. So it's trying to balance both of those things. And I found, at least in the adaptation, that I think that the book is much starker about the abuse. The book is much more clear-eyed about the abuse and that Lily knows exactly what's going on. And she has experience with this through her father and her family dynamic. And she's sort of like, you will never do this again to me, but then it keeps happening. And you wonder if this is an accident. I found movie Lily, like it's much more muddled. And then they kind of reveal intention at the end in a montage or not at the end, but sort of towards the end. And I found that they muddled it a little bit too much for my liking or like concealed it. And I had to wonder if that was sort of like, oh, we did test screenings and audiences turned on the character too soon. And maybe we need to like keep them in this romance a little bit longer. Maybe that was a screenwriting decision. Maybe that was the fact that the director of the movie is playing the bad guy, you know? So, you don't know where these decisions are being made, but like, I did find it a little odd, at least having read the book that they sort of concealed what was happening for so long. I also wish they had given my guy, Brandon, a little bit more to do. There's nothing to him besides hanging out and waiting for her to show up. Right, the guy, the hunky chef ex-boyfriend. The high school version, he gets a lot more to do of Atlas and that's a different actor as well. I do want to say Isabel Ferrer looks so much like Blake Lively. It's uncanny. I actually was like, oh, that must be a Lively. That must be Robin Lively's daughter. Because, you know, Robin Lively, the teen witch, is Blake Lively's older sister. But yeah, I think it's an interesting film to talk about because I do think that it lives in this long tradition of romantic melodramas and women's pictures, which were kind of the primary mode of Hollywood production in the 1940s. I was like, I could see Bette Davis starring in this movie. Yeah, I'm real passionate about it, for sure. I think people will be like, oh, it's cheesy. There's too many coincidences. And like that, that comes from the book. And I do think it's better than the book because the writing is, or the dialogue is sharper. The world is just a little bit more fun than the Colleen Hoover version of this world. But women are craving stories about relationships and romance, but also realism about that. So I think that it's serving an audience that is not necessarily being served by Deadpool and Wolverine. Right. No, my theater was packed at Thursday at 5 p.m. And I went with a mom friend of mine. And it was very crowded with all women. Real fast, the thing that you don't like about her being delusional, I thought that worked really well because it was an indication of the stories that you tell yourself. And when you're in the middle of something, you can't see it clearly. And it deviates from the book, but it struck me as actually one of the more realistic elements of this, that she would make excuses and try to smooth it all over because that's behavior she had known from her own childhood. And so I believed that. And then when you see what's really happening to her all the time, it's like, oh, of course. Yeah. Of course she couldn't see it because she didn't want to see it because she was in the middle of it. So I actually believe that. Yeah, no, I mean, it's interesting to hear how it reads to someone who didn't read the book. So that like, like, how does that read to you? Because to me, I was like comparing sometimes when you read the book, it becomes a problem because you're like comparing the adaptation choices too much. So it is interesting to hear, you know, from someone who like, does that work for you or does that not? And so, you know, it is it's a choice that works. What's your number then on it? Ends with us. Oh, gosh. Wait, this is out of 10, right? Yep. I'm going to say like a 6.5. OK, I'll say like a 5.8 because it's too well made and too well acted to dismiss it entirely. And Blake Lively is very good here. But there are a lot of questions that I have that we can't get into without spoiling things. Katie, you're the best. Thank you for being here. It ends with us is in theaters this weekend. Let us know if you're going to see it.