“Soap opera” is a term that conjures cliché images. In hindsight it’s a rather sexist phrase, like the studio-system category of “women’s pictures.” Soap operas have always dealt, at times in depth, with women’s experiences. When the phrase came into vogue, in the 1960s, soap operas were what housewives watched on network television in the afternoon (I’d watch my mother get absorbed into them). One of the many ways that they were unfairly sneered at is that the culture gave no credibility to the fact that soap operas were a serial form, which allowed them to slip into the nuances of a dramatic situation. Sure, they featured broad acting and a certain mannequin-model handsomeness and beauty, yet they gripped people — mostly women — because there was something vital and alive in them.
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“It Ends with Us” is an overripe saga of love and romance that’d also about some very serious dark things. But when I say it’s a soap opera, I mean that as praise. Based on Colleen Hoover’s 2016 novel (the script is by Christy Hall) and directed by Justin Baldoni (who is one of the film’s costars), it’s an avid and emotional movie that pulls you right along. If you go in not knowing what it’s about, and are therefore all the more surprised by where it goes, it may be even more effective. That’s true of most movies, but in a soap opera the plot is all — the twists you didn’t see coming, the ones that reveal life to be an improvised drama of fate.
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The film’s star, Blake Lively, has not made the impact in movies that she did on television with “Gossip Girl” (though she had a hit with the shark thriller “The Shallows” and was very good in Ben Affleck’s “The Town” and Oliver Stone’s “Savages”). But in “It Ends with Us,” she has a role she can sink her acting chops into. She fills the screen with her acutely aware and slightly tremulous radiance. She plays Lily Bloom, an aspiring flower-shop entrepreneur who we meet when she returns home for the funeral of her father, who during the eulogy she can’t think of one nice thing to say about (she’s got a list numbered to 5, all left blank). So there’s a forbidding backstory there.
Then, on a Boston apartment rooftop (sitting on the edge of it, actually), she meets one of the building’s residents, a self-styled stud named Ryle Kincaid. He seems, in a way, to be a figure out of soap-opera central casting. He’s a neurosurgeon, tall, dark, and dashing, with coal-black eyes that have a light in them, and he’s got a gift of gab that’s smooth and aggro and charming. Justin Baldoni is of Jewish and Italian descent, and he comes on like Sacha Baron Cohen playing a sexier version of Abbie Hoffman. We already see red flags (Ryle walks onto the roof angrily throwing a chair), but the complication that lures us is that he and the movie put the main red flag right out there. “Love isn’t for me,” says Ryle. “Lust is nice, though.” So he’s a player, and what we used to call a commitment-phobe, and he’s upfront about it. Lily, though, is no pushover. She’s got her guard up against a dude with a bit of a “Fifty Shades of Gray” vibe. She bids him and his seductive come-ons a fast if flirtatious goodbye.
She has bought a beat-up old storefront in the Back Bay, which she renovates and transforms into a flower shop with a lavishly ornate shabby-chic aesthetic. She hires Allysa (played by the always-welcome Jenny Slate), and the two become best buddies. That’s when the first twist happens: Ryle wanders into the store, because it turns out that he’s Allysa’s brother. So he and Lily reconnect, and she agrees, with a great deal of caution, to give him a chance. The way the movie is set up, he’s got to prove himself to her and to the audience.
At the same time, the film flashes back to Lily in high school (where she’s played by Isabela Ferrer, who matches up with Lively eerily well). There, we see her fall into a relationship with Atlas (Alex Neustaedter), a sensitive classmate she meets when he’s homeless, squatting in an abandoned building across the street from her family’s house. As we learn, he has a good reason to be on the street (symbolized by how he got his scarred hand), and though she helps rescue him, their connection is about something more basic: They click (despite the ridicule she gets from her classmates about it). We wonder: What’s the link between this romance and the one brewing between Lily and Ryle? Is she drawn to bad boys? Outsiders?
Love stories have more or less faded out of mainstream cinema, and it’s gratifying to see one that isn’t a rom-com, for once. As Ryle puts his player ways behind him, we want to see Lily happy, and we think: Maybe this is it. Then, one evening, at a hip eatery, the restaurant’s owner drops by the table, and Lily notices a familiar scarred hand. It is Atlas — now back from eight years in the military and other experiences. He looks…different. That’s because he’s played by a different actor, Brandon Sklenar (who suggests a baby-faced Russell Crowe), but also because he has aged into adulthood like fine wine. Aha, we think. So here’s the movie. Lily falls in love with the charismatic but questionable Ryle; sweet, chivalrous Atlas returns from her past. Who will she go with? The answer, at first, seems obvious (the blast from the past! à la “Casablanca”). But Ryle appears to be a born-again romantic. Maybe the movie is going to undercut our expectations?
It does, though not in the way we’re expecting. “It Ends with Us” is a story of how people repeat bad patterns in their lives, even (or maybe especially) when they don’t realize it. And the way this is conveyed is at once the essence of soap opera and also quite emotionally shrewd. For Lily really loves Ryle, and just like her we experience their relationship from the inside. When we see a glint of angry fire in Ryle, we want it to go away. Justin Baldoni’s performance is rivetingly layered — he makes Ryle a compartmentalized man, one who’s truly trying yet is unable to see himself.
There are more twists, including one that left an audience member at the screening I attended going “Noooooo!” (which kind of spoke for everyone there). Not because she didn’t believe it, but because she did. That’s what good soap opera does: It heightens the twists that life will throw at you. And in the case of “It Ends with Us,” it gives Blake Lively the chance to play a woman who tries to make the right choice, but has to wake up from the dream she’s been living in — maybe her whole life — to do it. By the end, we’re watching a different movie than the one we thought we were. But it’s still a love story, just one about learning to love yourself.
