Ruby Sparks - 3 smiles

“Ruby Sparks,” written by Zoe Kazan and starring Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan, takes a different approach to the romantic comedy formula. You take a little of Pygmalion and throw in a bit from Stranger Than Fiction and you have the premise for “Ruby Sparks.” But you never have the feeling that you’ve seen this story before. And Kazan explores not only what happens in a relationship when one person tries to control the other, but she also wants to know what truly will make us happy. Calvin Weir-Fields (Dano, Kazan’s real-life boyfriend) is a shy novelist whose first book brought him great acclaim but now he’s facing writer’s block. His therapist (Elliott Gould) asks him to write a one-page tale about his dog, hoping to re-ignite Calvin’s creative juices. Instead, Calvin creates the perfect woman, a red-haired artist named Ruby Sparks, which inspires Calvin to write. About a week after Calvin first conjures Ruby on the page, he finds the flesh-and-blood Ruby (Kazan) in his kitchen, cooking breakfast. He fears he’s lost his mind, but once he believes that Ruby is real, he’s all the more smitten. The vivacious Ruby brings out the best in the less than social Calvin. But though she seems like any other person, it seems that Calvin can change her at will with his written words.

On one level, this is a clever critique of modern romantic comedies where some free-spirit (Zooey Deschanel in (500) Days of Summer and Kiera Knightley in Seeking a Friend at the End of the World) exists largely to pull the sad-sack hero out of his funk. But on another, deeper level, it’s about our unwillingness to accept someone as he/she is. It’s about our fondness for falling in love with impossible ideals and then trying to change the people we do end up with. And when Calvin realizes that all he has to do is type a new sentence and Ruby will speak French or never want to leave his side, there’s an element of sadism to what he puts Ruby through. Paul Dano has played damaged men in movies before, but there’s such a nasty edge to Calvin that you think Ruby would be better off without him (and these portions of the movie are hard to watch). Kazan is consistently likable, deftly conveying her character’s emotional shifts, which grow worrisome as Calvin increasingly becomes the puppet master. Although the ending is a bit predictable, nonetheless “Ruby Sparks” is a creative romantic fable. 7/28/12