The highly anticipated movie adaptation ‘It Ends With Us’ finally hit the big screen Aug. 9. This movie was an adaptation based off the best-selling novel written by Colleen Hoover and had grossed $135,000 domestically, and $283,000 worldwide. The movie was “loosely”inspired by Hoover, to highlight her mother’s own escape from her abuse.
The storyline follows Lily Bloom (Blake Lively) a woman who sets off to embark on a new journey in Boston with her dream to pursue a career as a florist, and has an encounter with a neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid (Justin Aldoni) who lives on the top floor of her apartment. As her first love backstory with Atlas Corrigan (Brandon Skelnar) comes to the surface after an encounter at a restaurant, Lily’s love life begins to get tangled into a mess due to her conflicted romantic feelings for Atlas, and Ryle’s gradual aggressive behavior.
As a fan of both the movie and the book, I truly thought that the movie was a great re-telling of the story written by Hoover. Many elements in the movie felt so raw and emotional, as well as depicted realistic abusive scenes that made the audience overwhelmed with empathy and a flood of tenderness. This piece of cinema was a tear-jerker for the majority of the theater. However, there were specific details of the book that were not apparent in the movie, such as Lily writing letters to Ellen Degeneres about the period of her life with Atlas as children, and quotes from the book that left readers in a puddle of their own tears.
Furthermore, I do have some criticism about the actors’ performance, both good and bad. Aldoni did a magnificent job at portraying what seems like a picture-perfect guy who is immensely attractive and treats Lily more than adequately, and then showing what happens behind the scenes due to his own family trauma and pent up aggression due to his disturbing past as a child. On the other end of the spectrum is Lively, who didn’t do awful, but didn’t transcend her acting ability. Personally, I believe she doesn’t try that hard, and her performance in “Gossip Girl” really corroborates my statement. She also did a very poor job at explaining the true meaning behind this movie, which could have potentially triggered and touched people who have endured domestic violence, and instead promoted her substandard hair care line. Her frizz and knots were far more noticeable than her emotional performance in the movie.
The movie was a good adaptation to the book, but I think as someone who has re-read the book three times and has annotated every quote and meaningful paragraph, I think a lot more could have been done to this movie at the same time. All in all, I would watch it again as it still evoked emotion out of me.
