If you’ve visited a Barnes & Noble, or any chain bookseller, recently, you may have noticed the conspicuous advancement of the romance section. Once a sequestered, parallel universe of cheap paperbacks, with their winking, “bodice-ripper” cover designs, that existed comfortably on the margins of “serious” literature, the genre has recently found itself undergoing a renaissance and now graces bestseller displays near store entrances. As recently as 2022 it was announced hat the romance genre, while long profitable, is now the major growth leader in a struggling publishing industry. Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us, first published in 2016 by Atria Books and now a major release from Columbia Pictures, has played a large part in the genre’s increasing profitability. First exploding in popularity among TikTok’s “booktok” community, a group whose tastes seem to gravitate towards romance, young adult and fantasy novels and where the ecology of influencers, virality and hype have come to decide what lives and dies in the world of publishing. Hoover’s novel became a bestseller after gaining traction among the networks of creators and fans on social media. How one approaches the film will be partially decided by their attitude towards its genre and the broader cultural moment it emerges from, and It Ends with Us is unexpectedly fascinating as an exercise in changing tastes among young audiences.
Justin Baldoni’s film has the look and feel of faux-boho Target home decor, with plot contrivances played with the emotional depth of Taylor Swift lyrics (an artist who unsurprisingly gets a major needle drop at the film’s climax). It is hard to shake the uncanny emptiness of the film’s world, its veneer of plot, emotion and character arranged in such a way as to suggest a cinematic “aesthetic.” However, this competently arranged film-ishness isn’t enough to hide the purely instrumental function of the entire operation: the delivery of dramatic, highly emotional Moments. As for the plot itself, there is a lot of it. An overabundance of soap opera-esque twists and turns that the film itself seems to be suffocated, clocking in near the two-and-a-half-hour mark. We follow Lily – full name Lily Blossom Bloom – (played by Blake Lively) a young woman who finds herself stuck between choosing an increasingly turbulent and physically abusive relationship with hot neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid (director Justin Baldoni) and a teenage love who has suddenly reappeared in her life, Atlas Corrigan (Brandon Sklenar and Alex Neustaedter). Lily struggles to come to terms with the abuse she is suffering from Ryle, pushing her towards the protective Atlas, who shares with Lily a childhood of witnessing domestic abuse in his home. The increasing physical abuse from Ryle is shown to us through a baffling mix of misdirections and flashbacks that presumably attempt to capture the difficulty abuse victims often have in processing their experiences. Of course, Ryle also has his own tragic and scarred childhood that informs his psychology, revealed in one of those “capital-M” Moments.
If there is anything the film treats with weight and consequence, it is the trauma backstory. Every aspect of the characters and their lives is treated as window dressing for the real action: overplayed make-out scenes and the unraveling of long-hidden trauma. The “trauma plot,” as writer Parul Seghal called it in a 2021 New Yorker essay, is a useful device that conveniently communicates a character’s motivation and can be a post facto explanation for actions they take in the film, without having to invest in the minutia of actual characterization. Any character, no matter how weakly written, can be given a one-stop tautology, flattening pesky dimensionality. Of course, one might say, this is merely an aspect of the genre, similar to the kayfabe in professional wrestling, a winking unreality in the service of two people in elaborate underwear fighting (or, in this film’s case, fucking).
This heavy subject matter often chafes against the Hallmark nature of the rest of the film; everyone is physically perfect, mostly happy and the world moves along with a frictionless buoyancy. Lily opens a flower shop and effortlessly makes a group of eccentric friends. Outside of the jarring trauma plot, all is well and happy and good. This is perhaps the film’s most egregious sin – the suggestion of a cinematic overcoming of past “trauma,” in the most pop psychology sense, as the key to happy living. It is a narrow and sad view, that the characters populating our entertainment are defined only along the axis of the trauma they wear on their sleeve, waiting to be worked out so self-actualization can be achieved. This approach might say something about how people today view their own relation to trauma and struggle. The film often feels like a visit to a therapist trained only on Pinterest quotes, and art that only tries to rise to the level of bad therapy is not very exciting at all.
Photo courtesy of Columbia Pictures
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