IT ENDS WITH US

Rating: 2

IT ENDS WITH US, based on the novel by Colleen Hoover, follows blandly in the grand tradition of the Women’s Films of Hollywood’s Golden Age. In it, we meet the effulgently monikered Lily Bloom, a woman with a troubled childhood who is returning home through the exquisite New England autumnal landscape to bury her father. Bloom, played with more depth and subtlety that the role, or the film, demands by Blake Lively, is returning to the scene of a crime that will unfold in flashback as the story progresses. For now, suffice to say that Lily is pensive climbing the graceful staircase of her upper-middle class childhood home as her mother gently chides her for having left small-town Maine for Boston. These are quintessential WASPs, so there are no raised voices, no confrontations, just Lily apologizing as she leaves the funeral service without saying anything at all about her late father rather than give his eulogy.

But waste no pity on our heroine. She’s going to meet a tall, dark, and, of course, troubled stranger who will sweep her off her reluctant feet. He’s Ryle Kincaid (Justin Baldoni, who also directed, a neurosurgeon she encounters after they’ve each had a bad day. They trade the sort of intimate secrets people suffering a new trauma share with a stranger. Further of course, when they part, it’s just a matter of time before they meet again thanks to Lily’s new best friend, the sequin-studded Alyssa (Jenny Slate). Alyssa is a rich and bored and married to a man (Hassan Minhaj) who adores her, hence the series of pricey designer duds she sports while helping Lily clean out a storefront that will be the latter’s dream of a flower shop.

If Lily is the Bette Davis or Miriam Hopkins in this scenario, then Alyssa is Eva Arden, wise-cracking and wise in her own eccentric way. And if Ryle is Herbert Marshall, then Atlas Corrigan (Brandon Sklenar), Lily’s first love who makes a surprise return to her life, is George Brent. If you are not familiar with those names, never mind. It’s enough to know that the story is a textbook example of romantic melodrama, with no surprises and a curiously passionless tone despite the way both men yearn for Lily. The emotionally unavailable Ryle changing his whole perspective on women for her, Atlas still carrying a (respectful) torch, and both reduced to tears over this woman.

And why not? She is kind, she is industrious, she us artistic, and she looks like Blake Lively, even when played as Lily’s high-school self by Isabela Ferrer. She’s also, heaven help us, spunky in that non-threatening way that doesn’t make anyone uncomfortable. As the plot points tick by with regular monotony of a metronome, Lily discovers that she is more like her passive mother than she realized, and desperately fights her own feelings to overcome a history of abuse that leaves her with a black eye, stitches, and eventually, a beautifully symmetrical bite mark around the hear tattoo she wears on her collarbone.

Now, many classic films have made melodrama work, but the women involved, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, and the ci-mentioned Davis and Hopkins had more than a whiff of steeliness to them. Lively, while an excellent thespian, is cotton candy to their peanut brittle. It doesn’t help that the dialogue reads more like the purple prose of a love-struck adolescent girl suffering her first bout of hormonal overload. Nor that the tone is carried over into adolescent dreams of wardrobes heavy on sparkles, skin, and too much jewelry. The men of the piece fare worse, left with cringe-inducing cliches to mouth and little else to do than to stare obsessively at Lily in a way that is just barely this side of creepy. To be fair, they soldier on all of them, with Slate adding the sort of sprightly buoyancy that this desiccated effort desperately needed. As I have opined before, in a just world, she would be American’s sweetheart.

IT ENDS WITH US, after a surfeit of montages and Ms Blake contemplating Lily’s journey through a veil of melancholy, ends as predictably as it unfolded. Dull and stale though it may be, it does have the welcome virtue of being instantly forgettable.