Introducing "Ruby Sparks"

Ruby Sparks is a dream girl. She's not some perfect feminine ideal, but instead the kind of kooky twenty-something cutie, played by Zoe Kazan, who would appeal to a sensitive young man like Calvin (Paul Dano). Calvin is a writer, whose great tragedy is that he wrote a hugely successful novel in his teens, but has failed to live up to his talent in the subsequent ten years. Having about as much luck with the opposite sex as he has with his recent writing, Calvin is depressed and seeing a therapist (Elliot Gould). One night he has a dream about Ruby and begins writing about her, hoping to overcome his writer's block. The next thing Calvin knows, Ruby has appeared in his house and believes she lives there as his girlfriend. Calvin and his brother Harry (Chris Messina) discover, after some experimentation, that Calvin can change Ruby however he wants by altering his manuscript. However, Ruby proves to have a mind of her own.

In addition to playing Ruby Sparks, Zoe Kazan also wrote the script for the film and Paul Dano is her real life boyfriend. Thus the metaphysical and metatextual implications abound in a story about writers and writing, creators and their creations. Directed by the husband and wife team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, "Ruby Sparks" is a very simple and small-scale story. Perhaps it's a little too small-scale, because several of the movie's central concepts aren't explored to nearly the extent that they could have been, and few of the characters besides Calvin and Ruby have much depth to them. When Calvin discovers his new powers, he doesn't question how or why he suddenly has this ability. Those questions are left to Harry, whose role is pretty much limited to sharing Calvin's secret and acting as a reminder that Ruby isn't a real girl. And despite the appearances of many familiar actors like Elliot Gould, Annette Bening as Calvin and Harry's mother, Antonio Banderas as her boyfriend, Alia Shawkat as a fangirl, and Steve Coogan as a rival author, they don't get very much to do.

However what they script does get very right is the relationship between Calvin and Ruby, and how Calvin has to deal with the realization that even though Ruby is his ideal, he's not prepared for the emotional reality of dealing with her day to day. The story focuses on what happens after a hero lands his dream girl, on mismatched expectations, inevitable frictions, and misunderstandings. It doesn't matter what the mechanism of Ruby's existence is ultimately, when the point is to comment on the consequences of being with girls like Ruby, who fit that "manic pixie dream girl" trope. Harry even warns Calvin at one point that Ruby is the kind of girl who it's fun to fantasize about, but who doesn't make a good girlfriend in real life. The self-awareness of the writing helps to distance the film from any overt supernatural "Twilight Zone" vibes or the usual wish-fulfillment silliness like "Weird Science." "Ruby Sparks" technically could be classified as a romantic comedy, but it skips right over the meet cute and the courtship, and ends up putting the characters in some pretty unexpected places.

It also helps that the leads are both strong. Paul Dano has had a good year, taking on several lead roles in smaller indie films, including this one. Calvin is a pretty shameless cliché of the earnest, but frustrated young writer with a tendency to romanticize things, but he's very convincing in the part. In fact, he's so convincing that I'm a little worried that Dano is going to get himself typecast playing moody writers after this and "Being Flynn." There's something awfully sympathetic about him, even when he's being a complete jerk. Zoe Kazan has a decent list of screen credits to her name, but this is the first movie where I really took notice of her. I like that Ruby comes off as pretty ordinary at first, and it really is her personality and her particular charm that distinguishes her as Calvin's idea of a perfect girlfriend. Dano and Kazan's chemistry together also translates well to the screen, and I could easily image the two of them in a more typical romance.

As for Kazan's as a screenwriter, I liked the ideas in "Ruby Sparks" a lot more than the execution, but I certainly enjoyed the movie and think she has a lot of talent. I liked the humor and the attitude and the idiosyncrasies. I think she certainly has it in her to tackle something bigger and more ambitious if she wants. And I really appreciate that Kazan had the guts and the foresight to not just wait for the right part to come along, but to write her own best role for herself.
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