Similar
to last year’s “The Future”, I found “Ruby Sparks” to be a very annoying film
and far too cute for its own good. I am
a big fan of directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’s previous film
“Little Miss Sunshine” but their latest is a total dud.
“Ruby
Sparks” is about a genius author, Calvin Weir-Fields, who wrote a worldwide
best seller when he was just the age of nineteen. Ten years on and Calvin has yet to follow up
with another novel, sure he has written a few short stories, but a full novel
hasn’t even been close. The expectations
thrust upon him have crippled his creativity and as such Calvin has writer’s
block. He doesn’t even have a subject to
write about. One day he has an incredibly
realistic and vivid dream about a mystery girl and he is suddenly
inspired. He bolts to the typewriter and
writes continuously for hours describing this girl from his dreams, coming up
with her family life and her history in general. He names the girl Ruby Sparks and he suddenly
worries when he realizes he is falling in love with a figment of his
imagination. The next morning when he
wakes up he is shocked to see a girl in his house, let alone the girl from his
dreams. He is terrified that he has lost
his mind, he is already seeing a psychiatrist for other issues he is having,
and so he tries to tell his brother about it.
His brother is sure that Calvin has lost it, but when strangers start
reacting to Ruby’s presence, he suddenly realizes that she is very real. He doesn’t understand it, but he accepts
it. It isn’t long that he discovers that
the more he writes about her, the more he changes her. Whatever Calvin writes, Ruby will do. Calvin believes that she is perfect so he
stops writing his book, but eventually when the relationship starts to sour,
can he resist the urge to change Ruby again.
Right
from the start of “Ruby Sparks” it just rubbed me the wrong way. It failed to resonate with me any sort of
reality. I do not mind films with magic
or the absurd in them, but I still have to believe them, and I couldn’t buy in
to “Ruby Sparks”. Paul Dano is an actor
I usually really like but his performance as Calvin was terrible. He was like a giant wet bag, a soppy mess
when it came to Ruby and was incredibly selfish too. He had to be in control of their relationship
which is ironic since he is barely in control of his own life. Similarly Zoe Kazan was equally as infuriating
in the title role. Kazan is actually the
screenwriter of “Ruby Sparks” and she and Dano are also a couple in real life. Maybe the familiarity between the two actors
worked against them here because I really didn’t like their chemistry together
here. My main problem is I did not feel
a real emotion between the two of them and for the majority of the film. It was the cute and twee nature of the whole
production that drove me up the wall, and it had a level of smugness associated
with it, being too clever for its own good.
Towards
the end when the relationship takes a turn for the darker, I became a little
more interested in “Ruby Sparks” but Dayton and Faris’s handling of the
material was far too clumsy and uninspired to bring me back completely. It was like they wanted to take the film to a
darker place, but were afraid of offending their audience. There is a scene in the second half of the
film when Deborah Ann Woll shows up as Calvin’s ex, Lila and it is the best
scene in the film because for once there was some real emotion being displayed. Even though she only has one scene in “Ruby
Sparks”, Woll really stood out in her role.
Speaking
of bit parts, there are a couple of embarrassing performances by some well
known names in “Ruby Sparks” but the worst has to be Annette Bening, who plays
Calvin’s reborn as a hippy mother. She
is terrible as she floats around being all airy fairy and has a constantly
goofy smile on her face at all times.
Steve Coogan plays a variation on himself as usual, and Antonio Banderas
finds himself on a tightrope between not bad and terrible, but at least he
appears to be trying here.
Overall,
I found “Ruby Sparks” to be far too cute for its own good. Sadly it also came across as a vanity piece
for Zoe Kazan who wrote the screenplay and stars as the title character, and
her real-life boyfriend Paul Dano gave a rare bad performance as Calvin. While the film does have interesting themes,
like when does the control of an artist over his work finally end and when does
it have a life of its own and the differences between real love and
manufactured love for art, but it is dealt with so damn cutely that I just
reacted against it.
2 Stars.
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