Ruby Sparks - Movie Review

Funny enough, the next film I saw after The Odd Life of Timothy Green, is also about a person who materializes from someone’s imagination. Ruby Sparks is the story of a writer who creates the perfect woman on the page and in morning finds her in his kitchen.

Calvin (Paul Dano) is a young writer who has one novel under his belt. It’s a great novel. It catapulted him to genius status and everyone can’t wait to see what his next book will be. Problem is, he has writer’s block. He’s in therapy and trying to get over a failed relationship.

He begins to dream about a sweet, pretty girl and starts to write about her. He quickly becomes obsessed. All he wants to do is write more about her so that they can spend time together. Then one day, he comes downstairs and she’s in his kitchen!

I can easily accept crazy premises in films when they are done well and at first, this was going okay for me. The script is written by Zoe Kazan (Ruby Sparks) and co-stars Dano who is her boyfriend in real life. It starts out being cute and slowly tries to say a lot about relationships and what can often be unrealistic expectations we put on our partners. All of this was fine. My problem was that the story began to write it self into a box that it could not get out of.

It was nice that everyone could see Ruby because I hate when characters talk to invisible people. Ruby has a whole backstory that Calvin created for her, but when she wants to spend some time at her apartment and take an art class, there’s no explanation as to how she has a real apartment and where she would get money? I know it’s a fantasy, but if you’re writing a fun story with a modern, intellectual slant, you need to cover your bases. I would’ve enjoyed seeing clever ways for Calvin to solve these challenges so that Ruby can continue to believe her own existence.

By the end, there were too many unexplained issues gnawing at my brain. I saw some bright spots and I’m sure Ms. Kazan will grow as a screenwriter. She's a good actress and her and Dano were great onscreen.

I was really looking forward to this film, but in the end it didn’t measure up. There was a really cute dog in the film and he did look a lot like Antonio Banderas, especially when he wore his glasses!