'Endings, Beginnings': Drake Doremus' Latest With Shailene Woodley Is Tepid [Review]

When Daphne (Shailene Woodley) breaks up with her boyfriend, quits her job, and takes over her sister’s pool house, she decides to heed her friends’ advice and go six months without men or alcohol. “Six solo months,” she proclaims, “just me and my vibrator.” Her resolution lasts maybe a week; within a month or so, she has not one but two beautiful men pining for her. Oh, what to do!

That’s the set up for “Endings, Beginnings,” the meandering new drama from director Drake Doremus, the story of three impossibly pretty people being kind of horrible to each other to an indie rock soundtrack. It’s a mighty snoozy affair, in which we discover that Doremus’s cinematic style —intimate, personal, and improvisation — has not so much solidified as cauterized. He’s still capable of striking moments (he expertly uses flashes of visual information to signal memory), and the loose, off-the-cuff style of his shoots creates dialogues scenes that are convincingly conversational.

And, to be fair, the chemistry between his leads is palpable, particularly between Woodley and Frank (Sebastian Stan). They Meet Cute at a party when he bums a smoke, gives her one of Those Looks, and purrs, “Who are you hiding from, in that dress?” Soon he’s texting her Spotify playlists and little jokes, and they’re having a lot of sex, but oh no he does drugs, he’s a bad boy who slurs his words.

Meanwhile, she’s also seeing his friend Jack (Jamie Dornan), a bookish writer who seems comparatively safe and sturdy (while also sporting a smokin’ hot bod). She wonders if, instead of meeting the perfect partner, “What if you met two different people who give you two sides of it?” Wow, deep.

The problem with “Endings, Beginnings” is that Doremus never bothers to give us a compelling reason to care about a single one of these people, other than the fact that movie stars are playing them. To make matters worse, he buries them in a sea of indie relationship drama clichés: Characters stare out of windows while soft piano music plays, they half-whisper platitudes like “It feels like a star’s light: it takes so long to get where it’s going,” they have explicit sex, and just when you think all the boxes have been checked, along comes a pregnancy test. He ends up with something like a self-parody of the Earnest Festival Indie Drama.

Since his “Like Crazy” won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance back in 2011, Doremus has attracted a fairly vocal contingent of critics, who have accused that and subsequent efforts like “Breathe In” and “Equals” of being shallow, flaccid, navel-gazing nothings. For the record, I’ve found value in every picture he’s made — until this one. “Endings, Beginnings” feels like the movie his skeptics accuse his other movies of being. [D+]

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