It Ends With Us: What Is Going On With the Film?
glamour.com, I turned to my colleague and said, “Hey, that was actually pretty good!”I’m not a film critic, but the adaptation of ’s hugely successful bestseller of the same name, starring , was much more muted, thoughtful, and moving than I expected.
Lively’s performance of florist Lily Bloom (yes, I know) had nuance and heft, newcomer Isabela Ferrer stood out as a young Lily, and from my vantage point as a layperson with no training in the area, the script handled its delicate subject matter of domestic violence well.So why did I feel somewhat surprised to have enjoyed the film?
Because the roll-out has been awkward, strained, and at times bizarre. While it’s certainly fun to speculate on what exactly is going on (more on that later), the overall uneasiness that the public and media has shown with the movie and the controversy that inspired it is a telling reflection that we still don’t know how to talk about domestic violence and how it’s portrayed in popular media.For those unfamiliar, Hoover’s book tells the story of Lily, a young woman on the verge of opening up her own flower shop in Boston when her father dies.
At his funeral, Lily is unable to give a eulogy for a man she can’t think of “five nice things” to say about. We later learn through flashbacks that this is largely due to the fact that he abused her mother physically and sexually throughout her childhood.
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