PREMISE
When a woman’s first love suddenly enters her life again, her relationship with a charming but abusive neurosurgeon is upended, and she realizes she must learn to rely on her strength to make an impossible choice for her future.
THE GOOD STUFF
BLAKE LIVELY—I’ve been saying this for a long time, but Blake Lively is the real deal. She is a leading lady in every sense of the word, and she’s proven it in very low-key quality films (AGE OF ADELAIDE, THE SHALLOWS, ALL I SEE IS YOU, A SIMPLE FAVOR). This is another one to add to the resume.
Outside of flashbacks, she is in every scene of this movie, and never does it seem like this is a vanity project for her or that her character is wearing out her welcome. The main reason why this movie is recommendable is for this performance.
BALDONI (The director)- This movie could have easily fumbled the bag regarding the heavy stuff (and yes, the heavy stuff is very heavy for those who do not know what the novel is about). Director and co-star Justin Baldoni seems to be a fan of the novel and carefully directs this material. This is a movie that treats a very heavy subject with a lot of realism from many different sides as opposed to countless other films that treat this subject matter in a very black and white kind of a way.
THE BAD STUFF
BALDONI (The Performance)- To call this a bad performance would be inaccurate. He does fine here, and I’m unsure what the book calls for the character to look and sound like. This may be a very accurate representation of the novel. But in a film where Lively, Jenny Slate, Isabella Ferrar, and Alex Neustaedter are all doing fine and nuanced work… Baldoni seems like he’s straight out of a soap opera.
While watching Baldoni on screen, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the stage production of Beauty and the Beast and that version of Gaston (without all the singing). And that’s not necessarily a good thing in a story like this.
THE 1st ACT- This movie is 135 minutes long, and it feels longer than that. There are so many scenes establishing our two main characters as a happy couple, and that’s fine. I get it. But then you look at the clock, and we’re 30 minutes in. The use of flashbacks in this regard is necessary, but I wish they had just told the flashbacks all at once and then cut into the main story. They did not, and there’s a lot of exposition showing them at peak happiness before things go wrong. This could have been at least 15 minutes shorter than it was, and you could have cut a lot of that in the first act of this film.
THE UGLY STUFF
ATLAS- Not Young Atlas, mind you. His section of the movie is wonderful, and his character is something that the audience can get attached to. You can understand why the main character can have a sentimental attachment to Young Atlas. Unfortunately, we do have to run into Atlas as an adult, and there doesn’t seem to be character development at all.
Adult Atlas seems like a plot device more than a character, and yes, this is a very unconventional way to present a character like this in a film like this. But this is a pretty important character to sprinkle throughout the story’s main byline. Worse, he’s given a really interesting backstory that we never get a chance to know outside of dialogue and exposition.
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Ultimately, this film is better than it’s advertising itself to be. The trailers are not good at all, and the press run for this movie has been pretty bizarre given all of the borderline slanderous articles about the director (and Ryan Reynolds comedically taking over for the most notable interview of all of the press junkets).
Because I had never read the book, I went into this not knowing what to expect, even though I’d seen all of the trailers and all of the press interviews for this film. I know it wasn’t supposed to be that way, but it was. I was happy to see that it was an effective drama worth your time.
IT ENDS WITH US is in theaters now
