“It Ends With Us” is Crucially Important Filmmaking
Forget the chatter, see the film.
My partner Dr. Salha Bava is a couple and family therapist. She and I just watched Justin Baldoni’s It Ends With Us. Saliha first noticed this about her response to the film. “My therapist self, my sister self, my mother self, my daughter self, my women self are all chattering away.”
My response is very much the same. I have multiple voices in me reacting to and self-reflecting about the film. It Ends With Us landed for me physically at a somatic level in my gut, it landed in terms of my own history as a boy growing up, it landed at the level of what this film means arriving at this moment in time in our culture, and it landed emotionally as a story that drew me in and and held my attention completely.
Let me say this. Just from the standpoint of story construction, acting, arc, resolution, it’s great. Baldoni the director has shown himself to be a masterful story teller. Those aspects that he intentionally changed from what is in the book have made the film demonstrably better as storytelling. But beyond that, Justin Baldoni has done something crucial. He’s made a film that will cause conversations about how power operates in relationships and those are the crucially important conversations we all need to be having, men, women and non-binary folks alike.
It is my guess that by now it is more or less universally known that It Ends With Us is a story about domestic violence.
As such, Saliha said something very interesting from within the frame of popular culture. (Maybe she should be writing this article?) She said that the film was so beautiful, the locations, the style; the sumptuousness of the flower shop, the rural new England town and the beautiful shots of Boston. Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni and all the other actors are Hollywood lovely. The cinematography is transcendent. And therein lies the tension the film creates. As it slowly drifts toward the revelation of domestic violence, we feel the urge to resist knowing. “Give me back my pretty Hollywood romance story. I don’t want this. I don’t want to watch this.”
That tension we viewers have, mirrors what characters in the film experience. Blake Lively plays Lilly Bloom masterfully, a women who is caught up in the confusion and distortions of the slowly increasing violence directed at her by Ryle Kincaid, played by Baldoni. You see her not fully registering the truth of her situation in the same way we keep looking at the beauty of this Hollywood film for comfort, for respite. Surely, love will win out, yeah? It’s why we go to the movies, yeah?
It is in that tension that the film’s power resides. The way we actively seek to avoid knowing what we know. That abuse can be happening to us or someone we care about and we don’t want to recognize it. This is why I hope our age appropriate sons, daughters, and non-binary kids will see this film. This is why we need to go see it ourselves, because we all turn away from the truth of domestic violence taking place all around us. And for too many of us, we are the frogs in pots that are slowly coming to a boil.
Over that last ten years, I have spoken with Baldoni more than once. He and I have intersected, albeit briefly, around healthy masculinity work. I know enough about the history of his projects to know that he does not shy away from challenging subjects. His 2012 series My Last Days is an uplifting documentary series about life, as told by courageous people living with a terminal illness.
Baldoni has written about men and masculinity. He has spoken about the challenges of his own ways of being a man in his TED talk Why I’m done Trying to Be “Man Enough," viewed over 8 million times. All of which made watching him in the role of Ryle Kincaid particualarly compelling. Baldoni’s portrayal of Ryle is not for a moment Hollywood leading man charming, not to my eye. Baldoni subtly weaves the hard rigidity of control into the character from the outset. To some, this rigidity might be mistaken for being hyper-masculine, a man’s man, and therein lies the danger. Because for generations our dominance-based culture of masculinity has trained us, men, women and non-binary folks alike, to find that dominance-based masculinity compelling, even “dangerous stranger” attractive. What Baldoni gives us is a character that never falls back on the easy charm he could have effortlessly brought to that toxic dominance masculinity narrative. He gives us no escape. No easy references to Hollywood leading men who have charmingly pushed that narrative for a hundred years.
Blake Lively meets Baldoni’s energy as Lilly Bloom with compelling grace and skill. In the most challenging scenes, Lively and Baldoni’s work is transcendent. We witness Lilly’s deep seated need to reach through to Ryle’s humanity even as he descends bit by bit into more control and abuse. The water comes to a boil slowly. Which is the part young people need to see and understand early in life. As we all do.
Equally, when Lively’s Bloom comes to realize that there is no hope for her if she does not break free from him, her character’s shift to firm and unshakable self-protection is the model we need to normalize for all victims of abuse. I have seen some reviewers who use this to dismiss the film as “female empowerment.” As if teaching our daughters such a thing somehow isn’t artistically lofty enough. No. It’s art of the most crucial kind.
There has been a lot said about the potentential mixed messages in the novel that this film is based on. Baldoni worked with domestic violence activists at No More to insure that any perceived ambiguity (real or otherwise) in the novel did not make its way to the screen.
Our culture has long taught us to want collective silence over awareness of domestic violence in all its forms. This means that a film like Baldoni’s will face headwinds that disguise themselves in a variety of ways. Resist those head winds. No More calls on their homepage for folks to go see the film and then to join the movement to end domestic violence. With their active endorsement, I’d like to add my own. It Ends With Us is a film we and the young people in our lives should be talking and self reflecting about.
Are you or someone you care about at risk for domestic violence? No More has a resource page for getting help.
