Movies
Co-stars Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni are rumored to be feuding. Really, over this?
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Sony Pictures.
If there’s anything I love more than a bad movie, it’s a bad movie with lore. Lo, here comes an adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s spiritless and bestselling novel It Ends With Us, starring Blake Lively (who also produced it) and Justin Baldoni (who also produced and directed it). The details of the movie are almost ancillary to the details of the alleged mini-feud that seems to be emerging through the film’s promotion: Most of the cast members, as social media users with a lot of time on their hands have observed, have unfollowed Baldoni on Instagram and have sidestepped press questions about him entirely. The most dominant rumor thus far is that Baldoni was railroaded by Lively—and her husband Ryan Reynolds—during the movie’s postproduction. Others speculate that Baldoni made Lively uncomfortable on set, and that the rest of the cast has sided with the Go Piss Girl in solidarity.
Both versions of reality are perfectly plausible: On the one hand, Lively (along with her husband) is a powerful Hollywood figure and one of the movie’s producers. On the other hand, men. But after seeing It Ends With Us, I’m now less curious about who has true ownership over this movie and more curious about why anyone would want ownership over it in the first place. Perhaps Baldoni should consider rumors that Lively took over to be a blessing: He can live in a world where this movie is not his doing.
I am going to spoil the end of this movie for you now, because it is bad: Blake plays Lily Blossom Bloom (I know), a young woman who’s on the verge of opening up her own flower shop (I know) called “Lily Bloom’s,” which is stupid, because “Lily’s Blooms” is right there. The movie switches between teen Lily (ably played by an underutilized Isabela Ferrer) porking her first love (who also happens to be unhoused?) and adult Lily and her relationship with her husband, Ryle. Ryle is named thusly presumably because he gets Ryled up real easily over nothing—much of the movie is about him physically abusing his wife because he burned some eggs or because he’s jealous over the guy she dated when she was in high school. (If it sounds like I’m being dismissive about domestic abuse, I guarantee you I am not. This movie is largely detached from reality.)
Throughout the movie, Ryle slaps Lily; he pushes her down a flight of stairs; he sexually assaults her before trying to bite off a tattoo she got in honor of her first love. (The movie does deploy some restraint here; violence is creatively hidden from the audience, not showing us more than we absolutely need to see.) She gets pregnant, leaves her husband,