A Shailene Sandwich: "Endings, Beginnings" authentic, often ponderous but kept alive by Woodley

Endings, Beginnings (2020)

110 min.

Release Date: April 17, 2020 (Digital); May 1, 2020 (VOD)

Probably best known for 2011’s first-love romance “Like Crazy,” filmmaker Drake Doremus specializes in raw emotion and intimacy, telling outlined and heavily improvised stories that are fueled by characters rather than plot. In “Endings, Beginnings,” written by Doremus & first-timer Jardine Libaire, there is a love triangle, but the central focus is about someone who’s experiencing a pre-midlife crisis and needs to practice more self-love. It would be hard to blame viewers for finding the film to be a mopey, insipid wallow in self-pity, but despite some meandering and filmmaking indulgences, “Endings, Beginnings” is actually an emotionally authentic, recognizably human indie drama. Anyone who already has love-hate feelings about Doremus’ oeuvre, however, will likely not be sold on his latest. 

All in the same week, Los Angeles thirtysomething Daphne (Shailene Woodley) quits her job in the nonprofit art world and breaks up with her boyfriend of four years. When half-sister Billie (Lindsay Sloan), married and pregnant with her second child, takes her in to live in the pool house, Daphne comes to realize that she just needs a break to herself for six months, giving both men and alcohol. (Apparently, though, smoking American Spirits is just fine.) In the meantime, she begins a job search, but no one is hiring. Then, at her sister’s New Year’s Eve party, Daphne meets and flirts with Frank (Sebastian Stan) and then reconnects with an acquaintance, writer and professor Jack (Jamie Dornan). Both men start to give her the best of both worlds, but Frank and Jack are friends. Will Daphne’s relationships with Frank and Jack drive a wedge between them?

Throughout “Endings, Beginnings,” many will roll their eyes that Daphne has such an entitled navel-gazing problem, whether to commit to Christian Grey or Bucky Barnes, the Winter Soldier himself. And yet, not even the film shames Daphne for her decisions, nor is it easy on her. She almost regrets leaving her ex, Adrian (Matthew Gray Gubler), in case he was “the one.” Refreshingly, little artifice is felt in the narrative, even if Jack and Frank happen to be close friends (they are at the same party when Daphne meets them both after all), and what finally broke her is poignantly revealed in fractured, often muted flashbacks. This isn’t really a root-for-them romance, nor does it boil down to which man Daphne chooses. Before she falls in love with someone else, Daphne must choose to love herself first. When she comes out the other side at the end, Daphne is a little bit wiser and more decisive than the Daphne we met at the beginning.

Terrific in everything, Shailene Woodley (2018's "Adrift") is one of those intuitive and exceedingly watchable actors whom one gets pleasure out of just watching her think on screen. As Daphne, she has the film’s trickiest character to navigate, playing a flawed young woman who's still figuring herself out and doesn’t always understand why she does things. She knows that she can’t have her cake and eat it, too, but anyone who has been in a similar situation will be able to connect and understand the truth of the selfishness that is conveyed here: we want what we can’t have and put our emotions before logic. Sebastian Stan (2017's "I, Tonya") and Jamie Dornan (2018's "Fifty Shades Freed") also put in fine work, respectively, as the passionate, exciting Frank and the sweet, comfortable Jack. Other supporting parts are filled well by Wendie Malick, as Daphne’s judgmental mother; Lindsay Sloan, as Daphne’s half-sister Billie; and Kyra Sedgwick, as an old friend who gives Daphne work at her art and clothing shop.

Rough and honest, “Endings, Beginnings” can be messy without tipping all the way into melodrama. The shaggy authenticity that director Drake Doremus captures is often at the expense of telling an interesting story, but it is what he gets out of his actors, prominently Shailene Woodley, that makes you care about and identify with Daphne’s journey toward self-actualization. Reliant on close-ups, Marianne Bakke’s hand-held cinematography is hazy and restless, sometimes self-consciously artsy, but otherwise observant, and Daphne’s terse text conversations between Frank and Jack are made more cinematic by being relayed on the screen in spray-paint font. If the film itself can be too ponderous for its own good, Woodley’s performance is always alive and true.

Grade: B -