Actress Blake Lively (R) poses for a photocall during the premiere of the movie It Ends With Us in Copenhagen on Aug. 9.NILS MEILVANG/Getty Images
Intimate partner violence is an epidemic, often carefully concealed by the walls of what appears to be a happy home.
It shatters lives. And a punch need never be thrown. Emotional abuse, including coercive control, also fits this definition.
A new film, which is generating an enormous amount of buzz, takes on this issue through a gauzy Hollywood lens.
It Ends With Us, based on the bestselling novel by publishing sensation Colleen Hoover, stars Blake Lively as flower-shop owner Lily Bloom, who falls in love with Ryle Kincaid, an extremely handsome neurosurgeon played by Justin Baldoni, who also directed the film. There’s a meet-cute, a montage courtship, hot sex. A viewer knowing nothing about the plot might think they are watching just another romcom, lured in by the exciting prospect of a great love story, just like Lily.
Young women are seeing this in friend groups, sometimes vocally responding to the action onscreen in the theatre. “You know what’s coming, don’t you?” one woman said at a Vancouver screening this week, during an intense love scene.
What’s coming – and this is a tiny bit of spoiler for anyone who hasn’t read the novel or seen the film – is controlling behaviour, out-of-control jealousy, and violence.
At the end of that screening this week, young women, some in tears, were deep in discussions. “Just one time,” a woman said to her friend. What she meant: Just one incident of violence and I would leave. Another said that if Lily was her friend, she would kill her if she stayed with the guy. These are good conversations to have.
They are not the general conversation the film has inspired, however.
Rather, that is what I’ve heard described as the “Blakelash”: the piling-on of grievances against Ms. Lively, along with speculation about an on-set feud involving Mr. Baldoni, and intense criticism of the marketing and handling of the film, with the attacks aimed primarily at Ms. Lively (and sometimes spilling over to her husband, actor Ryan Reynolds).
Granted, some of the promotion does seem jovially out of whack with the film’s grave subject matter. “Grab your friends, wear your florals,” Ms. Lively said on TikTok, encouraging people to see the film. In an interview clip playing before the feature, Ms. Lively enthused about how she can’t wait for the film to be released; “It’s like Christmas morning!” she gushed. A clip from the press junket has been widely circulating online. When an interviewer asks how someone who understands Lily’s plight personally should talk to Ms. Lively about it, the actor jokes, dismissively, “You mean, like, asking for like my address or my phone number or, like, location share?” With a pleb? God forbid! was the intimation.
There was a promotional New York pop-up offering “Fresh Flowers & Fizzy Refreshments” (Ms. Lively also has a line of beverages) and a marketing e-mail with recipes for cocktails inspired by the film using her beverages and, The New York Times reported, in one case, the gin owned by Mr. Reynolds.
This has all been jumped on, with the internet criticizing Ms. Lively’s demeanour, her new hair-product line, her brand-flogging husband, Mr. Reynolds’s interference. (She has said that he rewrote a key scene.)
An old interview has resurfaced in which Ms. Lively treated an interviewer poorly: When Kjersti Flaa congratulated Ms. Lively, who was pregnant, on her “little bump,” Miss Lively congratulated Ms. Flaa, who was not pregnant, on hers.
There has also been much talk about a supposed on-set feud. According to TMZ, it was set off by Mr. Baldoni, who has back problems, inquiring about Ms. Lively’s weight ahead of a scene where he had to lift her. Ms. Lively heard about it and felt fat-shamed. Further, she felt a kissing scene went on too long.
All the gossip about this woman might be true; Ms. Lively might be a horrible person. Who knows? But the social-media mean-girls crowd is probably not the best arbiter of the situation.
Is she supposed to be morose through every promotional event? Does she sometimes display unattractive behaviour? (A-listers – they’re just like us!) And should this overshadow the serious conversation the film should provoke?
This Lively discourse feels like another form of misogyny, fuelled by schadenfreude: Blame the famous, beautiful woman. Much of it is being delivered by other women.
One thing Ms. Lively is very good at is generating publicity. That’s part of her job: to get people to see the movie, which delivers a message that could benefit a lot of people.
The film is far from perfect and I cannot speak to the literary merits of the novel, which I have not read. But this big Hollywood release was a chance to have an important conversation, not a bunch of petty ones. What a lost opportunity.