The "It Ends With Us" Angle No One Is Talking About

Fran Magazine: Issue #119 with special guest Tessa Strain

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Blake vs. Justin vs. Shark?

Last week I sat in a freezing cold Regal Essex theater watching the 130-minute-long It Ends With Us — the first of many forthcoming Colleen Hoover adaptations. I watched looking for one thing and one thing only: weird tension between star Blake Lively and co-star/director Justin Baldoni. The two play what is supposed to be a “regular couple,” from cutesy beginnings to dark turmoil, as the film shifts from Hallmark romance to PSA about domestic violence. For all of the movie’s themes and Jersey City exteriors, most of what anyone has had to say about it is that Lively and Baldoni hate each other, that Lively wound up getting control over the final edit, that Baldoni made her uncomfortable (fat-shamed her???), that she’s using the film to launch a hair product, that he’s the only one taking the domestic violence thing seriously.

Amidst all this yapping, one particular take stood out to me from friend of Fran Magazine and past contributor and star of the forthcoming Revelations of Divine Love… Tessa Strain:

Now here’s something to think about. Both Lively and Baldoni come from shark movie universes, her from the surprisingly harrowing The Shallows and him from the made-for-tv Spring Break Shark Attack. I was curious to know what type of role having played “victim of shark” might have had in this film, and for that I turned to Tessa.

Hi Tessa.

Hi Fran. I’m really thrilled you took my obvious bait (chum??) on Twitter and asked me to join you for this conversation. 

The Shallows might have been my first foray into my so-called brave era, and probably up until 2021, it was the scariest movie I’d ever seen, tied, maybe with M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs. Spring Break Shark Attack, however, missed me completely… Can you walk Fran Magazine readers through the differences in tone of these movies? It seems like Spring Break Shark Attack promises “sexy co-eds.”

That’s about half-right. Not to be all “well, the Bush Era” but Spring Break Shark Attack is very much a product of this specific sociological and temporal space (not just because it stars one-season regular from The O.C. Shannon Lucio) in that it’s both trading on the titillation of raunchy spring break culture (to the degree that was airable on prime time network TV) while also trying to finger-wag about it. I would say that it’s similar to Where the Boys Are in that it is putatively about sexy co-eds but is in fact something of a morality play where the heroine is allowed to survive her ordeal because of her virtuous character. Fran, the sharks aren’t just in the water; some of them are, in fact, not sharks at all, and one of them is Justin Baldoni in a shark tooth necklace. There are also actual sharks.

baldoni on right… duh

Wow, so you’re telling me that It Ends With Us isn’t the first time Baldoni has played a toothy villain. What’s his deal in the movie? Fuckboy? Manipulator? I’m picturing a less fun Dick Casablancas type.

“Less fun Dick Casablancas” is right on the money. He plays a predatory frat boy named J.T. who initally takes a soft approach to seducing our virginal protagonist but later roofies her at a party! Where she is rescued by the intervention of her more wholesome suitor named Shane (working class, reads books, no shark tooth necklace). This all comes to a head later on when J.T. charters Shane’s family’s fishing boat and they all have to hash it out in shark-infested waters. So arguably Justin Baldoni has had a long fixation with exploring the excesses of toxic masculinity and a willingness to embody them, shirtless (at least in 2005 — I haven’t seen It Ends with Us, but my understanding is he’s a doctor? surgeon? so a lab coat?).

Yeah, Justin Baldoni plays “Ryle Kincaid” ([mid-aughts movie trailer voice] Justin Baldoni IS Ryle Kincaid) who is a neurosurgeon — at one point, he gets to do a “groundbreaking surgery” for 27 hours or whatever. Not sure what this is supposed to be, like, a brain transfer? The inciting violent incident between his and Lively’s character is that he gets too horny for her while baking a frittata and then it starts burning in the oven and he accidentally goes to grab it without his mitts and burns himself and it’s a whole “my hands! I need them for my job!” thing, which would be funny, but then he smacks her. :( 

Okay, I’m laffing at “my hands!” although I’m sure it’s very serious in context and treated with immense nuance and sensitivity.

The Colleen Hoover promise! But back to the real sharks. Did you see Spring Break Shark Attack… on TV? Why do you know this movie? 

I watched Spring Break Shark Attack on network TV the night it aired, and I found out about it by reading the TV listings in the newspaper that week (“Sure grandma, let’s get you to bed”). It’s a movie with literally zero cultural footprint (I have never met someone who has seen it independently of me inflicting it on them), but it did have a small DVD run, which I know because I own the DVD. 

I had gotten a text from my now-husband and Fran Magazine subscriber Geoff letting me know he had seen it on sale at the Blockbuster near us that had been in the slow process of selling off all their stock, so I ran out and purchased it for something like $4. This would have been in 2009. I think I must have been talking about it like it was some tragically lost text, which isn’t exactly untrue…

So, to confirm, you still have it?

Oh my god, of course. Come over and watch it anytime. I actually have a pretty solid collection of made for TV and straight to DVD sharksploitation flicks because people used to give them to me as gifts, but the actually watchable ones are few and far between.

Let’s talk Lively and The Shallows for a second. I’m usually operating under the assumption that everyone has seen The Shallows, but for Fran Magazine readers who haven’t… compared to something like Spring Break Shark Attack, The Shallows is almost feigning realism? Is that crazy to say?

I think it’s fair to say that The Shallows makes a more than meaningful gesture at realism, albeit in the way that showing Butch and Sundance loading their guns once is supposed to let us suspend disbelief at their seemingly endless supply of ammo in the climactic shootout does. In 2016 we were coming off a long streak of sharksploitation movies that were largely defined by their outrageousness and winking self-awareness — very memeable, very epic bacon. Sharknado would be the obvious mainstream example, but that was kind of the midpoint of that trend, which really was formed in the crucible of the SyFy original movie production slate. 

To me, The Shallows was a breath of fresh air in its seriousness and sincerity—I think the only comparable example in the 2010s would have been The Reef, which I think is legitimately good and scary, although the first half hour could be deservedly critiqued as  “Australian Joe Swanberg movie.”

To return to The Shallows, there’s a little bit of hand waving in the sense of, say, not investigating too closely if you can really stitch a wound closed with the jewelry you wore to go surfing in, but nobody’s being cute about it. And actually I think a big driver of the tone and the reason it’s successful has everything to do with Lively, who has real action chops. She’s grounded and credible in this role in a way I think she rarely (if ever) is as a romantic heroine.

copyright sony

Something I was thinking about as I watched It Ends With Us, as a fan of The Shallows and a friends with people who have watched Age of Adeline multiple times experience, is whether Lively is the kind of actor who elevates something like a shark movie or action film from, like, a C+ to a B-, or whatever, or whether she’s a movie star of her own accord. My initial take on the Lively v. Baldoni of it all was that these are two television stars vying for one movie star position, but maybe it’s more complicated than that. What’s your read on her as a “movie actor”?

She has basically shed the TV associations at this point — I don’t see her being described as “Gossip Girl star Blake Lively” anymore. That said, I have complicated feelings on her as a capital S “Star,” largely to do with the fact that, as I mentioned earlier, she strikes me as chronically miscast. 

The Shallows is a uniquely good use of her talents in a similar way as Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is, namely that she’s most believable as a jock. You know when you disembark at the Denver airport and there are suddenly all these women in half-zip fleeces with long blonde ponytails who looked like they played varsity volleyball? That, to me, is what she evokes. I don’t quite buy her in the same way as a conventional romantic heroine in the late ‘90s Gwyneth mode that she seemingly wants to emulate. Actors have managed to thread that needle before (Jennifer Garner being an obvious antecedent), but I don’t think Lively has been as persuasive. 

But I will say that The Shallows is a movie that made me think, okay, she has the goods in a Movie Star way. You could absolutely make The Shallows with somebody else (Kaya Scodelario gives a very comparable performance in Crawl, for example, which I also think is a great flick), but I do think The Shallows owes a lot of its blockbuster sheen to Lively’s star power. But that said, it’s easy for me to imagine a universe where she had way worse representation in the aughts and ended up starring in Spring Break Shark Attack.

Funny you should mention the Denver airport of it all because while watching It Ends With Us, one of my main thoughts was that — fatshaming, body image, whatever — Lively does look like a very hot but admittedly real-looking person. She hasn’t fixed her teeth. She has a bit of postpartum weight. Like, how crazy is it to see a woman wearing a bralette in a movie and we actually can’t see her ribs? Whereas Baldoni, on the other hand, looks kinda scary, like if that soap opera star and the guy who keeps drinking (?) his son’s blood to stay young forever were combined into one man. This had me wondering: Does relative hotness matter in a shark movie? Do the hottest among the cast ever really survive?

Baldoni absolutely has a terminal case of Soap Opera Face, like George Hamilton (notably, one of the stars of Where the Boys Are), not to be confused with Influencer Face, which has supplanted it.

I think in most shark movies hotness is more or less immaterial to survival. It’s not really a spoiler to reveal that Baldoni’s character meets his end in the jaws of a tiger shark near the conclusion of SBSA, because the movie is operating on a slasher-style moral logic that demands his punishment, whereas good guy Shane (also hot, arguably less scary face) merely gets inadvertently harpooned in the shoulder on Shannon Lucio’s grad student brother’s research boat (Fran Mag grad school angle!) and lives to tell the tale. The Shallows, on the other hand, is a survival thriller, so it’s sort of supposed to be beneath your dignity to think about the fact that Lively is in a bikini—it’s not her fault she has to repurpose her wetsuit top into a compression sleeve for her horrible leg wound! She is a MED STUDENT and she’s trying to LIVE! 

Question for you: would you rather get a brain transfer™️ from Ryle Kincaid or have your dislocated shoulder set by Nancy (we haven’t even talked about how Lively’s character in The Shallows is the only millennial in history named Nancy) like she does with that seagull on that craggy ol’ rock of hers?

Thank you so much for looping in the grad school angle. You’d think Blake and Justin might have bonded over playing the only millennial Ryle Kincaid and the only millennial Nancy… Ultimately I choose to love my brain and I give my dislocated shoulder over to Nancy — I kind of think most civilians could reset a dislocated shoulder if the moment called for it. What about you?

I think yours is the correct answer, but well-behaved women rarely make history so I’ll volunteer for the brain transfer™️ just to see what happens. Maybe I’ll finally have a worthwhile thought.

All your thoughts are worthwhile to me, as evidenced by this interview. For our last big question, some time has passed since either Lively or Baldoni have gone up against a shark. Who do you think would fare better now? And show your math, please.

shark

I think the best way to answer this question would be over the course of a feature length movie about an established Hollywood actress/exec producer in conflict with a writer/director/co-star trying to make a leap to the big time on the set of an ocean survival picture… but the action starts to get all too real when fins begin circling the production. Twenty-page treatment incoming.