A movie or book can address a serious, emotionally wrenching subject and still be a thing you can’t help snickering at, a dramatic pileup that leaves you muttering “Oh, come on!” under your breath. , the film adaptation of ’s ferociously popular 2016 novel, works hard to ping all the appropriate notes. This is after all, a story of domestic abuse, a more widely shared experience in real life than most of us want to face up to.
(Hoover has said that the book was inspired by her mother, who was physically abused by Hoover’s father.) And the objective reality is that we movies like . The classic genre known as the woman’s film—pictures like King Vidor’s 1937 or either version of filmed first by John Stahl in 1934 and later, in1959, by Douglas Sirk—thrived in the ’30s, ’40s, and beyond by carving out a .
Women, and sometimes men, often need to cry it all out, and aren’t the movies—a refuge in the dark—the perfect place to do that? But —directed by Justin Baldoni, who also co-stars—doesn’t have the mojo to get the waterworks pumping, not even in a gentle, reserved way. stars as the kookily named Lily Bloom, a thoughtful young woman with a hippie-patchwork wardrobe and a guardedly bright outlook on life. She lives in Boston; she’s about to open her own flower shop, the fulfillment of a lifelong dream.
In all ways, this is a period of transition. Her father has just died, and she’s not sure what to do with her mixed feelings; as we learn more ab.