Ruby Sparks, Cert 15, 104 mins - review

Idealistic rom-com centered around a struggling and unlucky-in-love writer who's ideal woman on paper comes to life
ruby sparks film
12 October 2012

What would you do if the girl of your dreams suddenly became a reality in front of you? Paul Dano’s Calvin, a young literary wunderkind with writer’s block, fashions such a girl and finds the real thing (Zoe Kazan’s Ruby) in front of him.

He is at first nonplussed, but not for long. She is soon sleeping with him, cooking for him and generally becoming an excellent putative wife. What’s more, he can change her a bit every time he sits at the typewriter when things go wrong. Even Elliott Gould, his psychiatrist, is surprised.

The film is a kind of fantasy rom-com that aspires to be something more intelligent than usual. Which befits the fact that the married directing team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris made the Oscar-winning Little Miss Sunshine, and Kazan, clearly a talented writer as well as performer, wrote the screenplay.

With the assistance of Antonio Banderas as Calvin’s sculptor stepfather, Annette Bening as his mother, Steve Coogan as his agent and Chris Messina as his brother in cameo roles, Ruby Sparks pushes beyond its initial remit of entertainment towards a discussion of how we can invent love and how love can reinvent us.

It is nothing like as notable as Little Miss Sunshine but we do get a comedy with sparks to it and a romance that has some genuinely affecting moments. If it pulls a few punches, and has an ending that seems pie in the sky, it is at least ambitious enough to dare to be something different.

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