Last year, the punishing Sound of Freedom became a cause celebre, if not a true sleeper hit. Then again, when I saw it on a Friday afternoon at the AMC White Marsh 16 a year ago this week, there were plenty of people there. Lots of families, people looking for something interesting. No one left. A brutal movie, but boring, too. I was still disappointed that so many people reflexively dismissed the film out of hand because of its right-wing backers and astroturfed “smash opening”—they bought out whole screens and made empty theaters look like sell-outs. Totally bogus, but the media wouldn’t let it go, and when I saw it in August, six or seven weeks into its release, it was still playing, and people were still going.
Some people. When The Passion of the Christ came out in February 2004, it got nonstop media coverage, major engagements, and full houses across the country. I’ve rarely seen The Senator Theatre here in Baltimore so crowded, and that was definitely the longest I’ve ever waited in line there. Everyone knew going in that Mel Gibson’s Christ epic was incredibly violent and grim; the only Hollywood movie that comes close is Mandingo. Many knew they’d hate it, had already made up their minds, or were ready to embrace it and see it over and over again—most of all, people went because they wanted to see what all the fuss was about.
The new Colleen Hoover adaptation It Ends with Us belongs in the same category as Sound of Freedom and The Passion of the Christ: aesthetically vacant but nonetheless compelling, revealing something of the contemporary American psyche. If 2004 was the time to watch the Son of God torn apart for our sins, the 2020s are all about airing past traumas and calling it art. Hoover’s books are immensely popular, and It Ends with Us is heavily autobiographical. First a hit in 2016, then a TikTok sensation in 2021, Hoover has already released a sequel (It Starts with Us) and another movie is on the way. Blake Lively will direct and star in that one; no more Justin Baldoni, the director and co-star who’s been inexplicably iced out by the entire cast and crew in public. His character figures heavily in the sequel, but maybe they’ll turn it into a musical like the new Joker and play it like a comedy.
It Ends with Us is 130 minutes, almost exactly the same length as Sound of Freedom. It’s far more watchable. You know, I didn’t check my watch until five minutes before it ended. But there’s something interesting about how overblown and bad Blake Lively’s performance is—she keeps the movie from turning into a truly miserable slog. Lively is Lily Bloom, a florist traumatized by her violent father; the movie opens with her storming off the stage at his funeral, unable to say anything nice. She meets a guy soon after, they get together, he seems fine; there are flashbacks to a teenage Lily and her first boyfriend Atlas (Alex Neustaedter/Brandon Sklenar) being beaten by her dad, and eventually he shows up in her life accidentally alongside director-boyfriend Ryle (Baldoni). Some people aren’t who they seem, and there are some brutal fights, misunderstandings, sudden bursts of violence—high melodrama without any hope.
Besides the thudding and joyless tone, the movie exists in a vacuum, full of cliched people who aren’t even recognizable as movie people; it feels like a peek into whatever an AI film might look like. None of these characters occupy our universe—forget mentioning the pandemic, as any contemporary 2020s film should, however indirectly, there’s no personality at all in any aspect of this movie. Of course it’s poorly-lit like all contemporary digital productions, and it just feels horrible watching it, sitting there disconnected from anything but a closed mediocrity. The only thing that keeps it compelling is Lively’s Artaudian performance—I really wish it looked better, because there’s something to the new American brutality. Nearly eight years after Donald Trump invoked “American Carnage” in his inauguration speech, the phrase has come to characterize much of our contemporary media: apocalyptic, holocaustic, romance as horror movie.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @nickyotissmith