It Ends with Us
SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT - A WHOLE LIFE IN TWELVE MOVIES
Kathleen Norris & Gareth Higgins’ new book A Whole Life in Twelve Movies: A Cinematic Journey to a Deeper Spirituality is published on October 15th - and we’d love you to join the launch team.
In exchange for helping get the word out you can get a free pre-release digital copy of the book, access to a Facebook group to discuss it, and can participate in a zoom call with Kathleen & Gareth
Click here for the sign up form to join the launch team.
If you sign up now, you’ll get your free digital copy on September 9th.
Word of mouth is one of the best ways to help a book come to life in the world - so we’re sincerely grateful for your support.
Gareth Higgins on IT ENDS WITH US
I know people who’ve lived with the threat of violence in the place they should feel safest. I’ve seen turn the other cheek misused to keep people not only in sorrow, but in danger. I’ve seen torment justified on the basis that “he’s stressed at work”, or "you don’t know how they were treated as a child”. But until It Ends With Us, I don’t think I had seen a mainstream movie that takes intimate partner violence seriously enough to actually try to understand it, and certainly not one in which the person targeted by the violence can claim their own agency, while the person doing the violence can be stopped but also offered mercy.
Based Colleen Hoover’s novel, It Ends with Us is a surprising film. I expected a soft focus version of one of the hardest things, but instead found a compelling and moving drama in which creative substance far outweighs the overworked prosaic.
Neither masterpiece nor soufflé, it reminded me of the gentle-harsh dramas that Mike Nichols made in the 1980s - in particular Heartburn and Working Girl, each of which feature leading women empowering themselves away from people who would mistreat them. It also stimulated memories of The Prince of Tides, Barbra Streisand’s film of Pat Conroy’s novel. Those three movies surely influenced the tone of It Ends with Us, because they all take place in versions of the US that feel about 80% real, the supporting act best friendships feel about 60% real, and the apartments feel about 40% real, but the emotional truth touches an uncommon credibility. I say this with significant consideration: I think It Ends with Us might save lives; it will almost certainly help some people escape from harm. What’s most surprising, and welcome, is that it may well help some people reflect on their own harmful actions, and seek help to change.
Blake Lively gives a nuanced and completely believable central performance as Lily Bloom (the name would be a movie cliché if the script didn’t acknowledge that fact), a young woman mourning the death of her abusive father, and holding the dream of opening a flower shop to match her name. At the beginning Lily is kind, tender, with just a touch of sass; but during the two or three years over which the story takes place she evolves not only a clearer idea of healthy boundaries but the strength to hold them.
After her dad’s funeral Lily meets a hot guy on a balcony, has the kind of fluffy-flirty conversation that used to only happen in movies but now movies have affected real life so much that they actually do happen on balconies. Ryle the neurosurgeon is played by Justin Baldoni, who developed the novel for the screen, and directs it with a kind of subtle intensity that makes me want to see it again.
A relationship ensues, peppered with Lily’s memories of her first, teenage love, a boy exiled from his own home (Atlas - another potentially ridiculous movie name, played by Brandon Sklenar); how they find safety and come alive with each other is one of the story’s anchors. The security Lily had with Atlas, ripped away by her father, is part of what saves her later. For although Ryle does care for Lily, and he learns by her presence that perhaps he can actually commit to a long-term relationship rather than believe the self-talk which tells him that he’s only able to casually date, he is given to emotional outbursts and physical violence. The first time he’s deeply apologetic; the second he denies; the third he appears almost possessed by the desire to “conquer” by defeating an imaginary enemy. The whole time he’s both unconscious of the impact of his actions, unaware of his inability to regulate his emotions (or perhaps he overstates it to himself). His blowups harm her, and he’s (a bit) sorry, but not sorry enough to understand that he needs to take steps to change, and that those steps cannot be done alone.
Baldoni manages to make the complexity of Ryle’s character utterly credible, though it would be good to see more of his inner life. But he makes a person whom we see behaving violently into one with whom we empathize. The script - and Lily - finds a way to neither let him off the hook nor destroy him. It Ends with Us culminates on a note of triumph, but not conquest.
That a person be both kind and cruel, and that a person can have both suffered and cause suffering; that a person can be trying to change but never invite the kind of input or take the steps that will actually lead to the change needed - this pattern is likely familiar to many. But it’s rare for a mainstream movie to treat the evolution of a relationship from romantic fire to shocking abuse, and of the target of violence from wanting not to believe that a person she loves could treat her this way, through hoping he’ll change, through holding boundaries and creating safety for herself. Not only that, but offering him a path that might actually lead not to her saving him, but him saving himself.
Some have criticized It Ends with Us for presenting a simplistic path to transformation, and I can understand why. People often don’t accept responsibility quickly for the harm they’re causing; and the economic and relational support required to leave an abusive relationship isn’t automatically available either. The movie also suffers from the screenplay orthodoxy which structures stories as if everyone only has one meaningful peer relationship, has brunch with the same people every week, and doesn’t know anyone else. One of the ways life is not like the movies is that we live in villages, not cubicles. That said, there is a depth to the three central performances that’s unusual outside the arthouse. It Ends with Us is pigeonholed as what used to be called “a woman’s picture”, but it's as much about the two men who loom in Lily’s life. Both of these men learn something about how to treat others; perhaps how to treat themselves. And while change doesn’t usually happen in a linear fashion, the emotional truth here is deeply valid.
Life is indeed sometimes a dance of interaction and boundaries with others, jealousy, childhood trauma and hope retransmitting itself, a desire to experience love and share it with others. Someone scarred by the pain of their past may well be more likely to accept it from someone else in the future; and someone guilt-ridden for a terrible mistake might well take it out on others, But sometimes hurt people don’t hurt people, but instead by claiming their own humanity, survival, and healing, they mirror the possibility to others, even to the person who has hurt them. The acceptance of that offer to change can be the start of something. It is undoubtedly most important to protect the vulnerable from the behavior of others, but It Ends with Us might also be a beginning toward stories in which even those who most need to change might have the chance to do so.
Kathleen Norris’ THREE THINGS: SCIENCE TALK
I love science but don’t have the math skills to understand much of it, so I content myself with reading about the exciting work that scientists do. The astronomers on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea, for example, have discovered an unusual star that has the most powerful magnetic field ever observed. When it eventually explodes and becomes a supernova, it will become the most powerful magnet in the universe. Scientist Nadine Manset explains that “Magnetars are rare and mysterious objects, and this discovery will enhance our understanding of how such stars form.” The Hawaiian monarch King David Kalakaua, a science buff who first invited astronomers to work on Mauna Kea in the 19th century, would be thrilled.
I always enjoy reading Guy Consolmagno, a former physics professor and later-in-life Jesuit who is the public face of the Vatican observatory, the only Vatican institution that does scientific research. "The work we do here can take 10 or even 20 years before it bears fruit,” he says, “and the Vatican is happy to bear it. This means we can do the kind of useful but not very glamorous work that the rest of the field needs but that no one can afford to do.” For example, Consolmagno says that “measuring the physical properties of meteorites provides data that is widely used, but will never win a Nobel Prize.”
When I worked for the North Dakota Arts Council in their visiting artist program, I often used science to inspire children to write poems. The results were inspiring. A second grade boy wrote a poem about a brontosaurus stretching its long neck so it could sing a love song to the moon. A sixth grade girl described photosynthesis as the love the sun has for leaves. A high school student became fascinated by fractals, and wrote a long poem entitled “Fractals Are Everywhere” that convinced his math teacher to begin using poetry in her classes. She’d realized that having students write poems about mathematical concepts gave her a good idea if they were just memorizing the right answers, or if they truly understood them. Anything that links poetry and science feels like a win to me.